Trust: A Novel Part 41

A noise of scrambling; overhead illumination; exposure. A vale of sandwich rinds.

"Good Lord," William said, "it's a graveyard."

"They left an awful mess," his son confirmed. "I thought you were gone. I told Mother so. She called on Connelly's line. Cletis swallowed a b.u.t.ton."

Stefanie's tea rose was pasted to his collar.

"Oh Willie!" she exclaimed, shooting me a lofty crafty look, "see, now you've gone and embarra.s.sed my only fiance! And we weren't doing anything I bet you didn't do in your prime either!"

She had, by that easy abbreviation of his name, fulfilled her dare. He was to be her father-in-law. She reduced him to an intimacy. She claimed him.

"Oh my father in his prime!" said William's son through his neutral withholding smile; and addressed the subject of his apostrophe: "Only it turned out to be a Canadian penny. With an engraving of the Queen on it actually. Cletis said it was a b.u.t.ton," and recounted how the doctor had held Cletis upside down until the coin shook itself out.

"When I was little I once ate a stock certificate," Stefanie volunteered.

"You'd better not eat any around here, they're mostly Mrs. Vand's," said William's son. "That's why her daughter turned up today-on business for Mrs. Vand. That means she's checking her mother's files for teeth-marks. Show your incisors. Stef; let her see if they match."

"They match yours," I told him.

"Or my father's in his prime," he muttered.

But William was retrieving the carol of his daughter-in-law's laughter from the whorled air as though he could hear in it the beating of his prime; he did not attend. The nict.i.tation of his slow lid seemed underwater, like that of a diver oscillating in a still pool: his reaching fingers widen to comb the sea in hope of catching the snarl of an eddy he remembers, in which something, he does not know what, falls and falls.

Meanwhile his son wheedled a bonfire into the snout of a new black cigar. The act was a drawstring that teased his pupils along a comical slide toward their mutual confrontation; then he lifted his martial head, freed, for a mocking even view of me. "Talk of teeth-marks! Has he been chewing you over? He has to give advice, you know; it's his living," he observed. "No! And still you've come out of there looking martyred?"

"What's martyred?" said Stefanie.

"What they do to saints," William's son supplied, "when they're ignorant and illiterate and have impoverished vocabularies."

"Then it won't ever happen to me!" she crowed. "Will it Willie?"

William glared at his wrist.w.a.tch, then at his son.

"St. Stefanie," said the latter, "martyred circa 1957 A.D. for the improper severance of a proper noun."

Beneath his imaginary helmet I seemed to see the lost flower breathe into bloom.

"I would never do a thing like that, would I Willie?" shrieked William's daughter-in-law-to-be, entwining us all in her joy.

Part Four.

Duneacres.

1.

It is only the secret reasons which really account for a marriage.

Why did my mother marry Enoch Vand? Not for the reason William held-that public and plausible justification of an unjustifiable suddenness which, like the rest of my mother's fabrications drawn up to satisfy William's respectability, William gave out to me as conservatively as if he believed her lie. It was to himself he lied. Without having to be persuaded, and after so long resisting persuasion, my mother married Enoch Vand: but she married him not for me. In name or act he would not feign fatherhood. He thought me an impediment-not to freedom, but to honesty-and my mother knew it; also William knew it; I dimly knew it, feeling behind Enoch's self-conscious indifference to me a more encompa.s.sing indifference. He had the disregard and detachment of one who has given up, yet perversely retains a metaphysical interest in the motions and motives not of the abandoned thing, but of renunciation itself.

This brought my mother to him. A marriage can be a sacrament of despair, and a seal on loss. Or say: it is possible to get used to a revised sense of the self.

My mother (it was remarkable) revised herself and chose Enoch. The war slammed down like a guillotine between America and Europe: she revised, if not her vision, her commitment, and fell almost comfortably into a defense of bad marriages. "If I don't like it," she told William's wife, who after the ceremony stood with her peeled-looking pink hands like the narrow bony heads of carnivorous hawks, "I can always lump it. Following William's example, you know. What the law hath joined together any old divorce court can put asunder." Sarah Jean was heavily pregnant, and in a conscientious voice of meritorious accomplishment reminded the bride of the claims of Divine Law. "Well," said the bride, with a smug tug at the virginal coil of her turban, "if Divine Law doesn't recognize divorce then it's got to recognize polygamy, that's only logical: ask the Heavenly Judge when you get there. What William's done with you he's done with me, don't forget it; and did it like a stick, I don't know how he is with you, but I've had better than that, I've had living blood"-this unholy phrase being the last Sarah Jean was ever willing to receive from Allegra. She turned the arc of her belly like a reproof flourished within a parenthesis, and presently sent a servant to the door to accept Allegra's gift at the birth of William's son; but it was a servant who brought it.

My mother married Enoch, and in the end without having to be persuaded, Because she had given up expectation of renewal. The war slammed down like a guillotine; like an electrified gate; like an oven door. Europe was inaccessible. Nick was irretrievable. He could never be found, he would never come back. Who would find him? He was lost, he could never be found, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck, in all that tangle of time and armies. She felt time on her. Brighton was devoured. And if it was a Hundred Years' War? What would that bring her? She mourned Brighton, but felt time; and married Enoch.

He was willing to succ.u.mb to the ordinary. He was workmanlike; he handled actualities; he met conditions (he said) pragmatically. His pragmatism lay in his seeming to think un-pragmatically, without regard for consequence. "We share the empty aftermath," he told her, "of the extraordinary. Have you been betrayed? So have I By what? By a beautiful commitment, in my case; in yours by a commitment to beauty. Now I am the opposite of beauty, as you may have noticed. I don't mean physical beauty; I'm no Nick; but I don't care about that. I mean I wouldn't want you to be harboring wrong notions that I'm somehow immensely worthwhile 'within.' I am not. I'll tell you now I'm not ambitious, and don't care about influence; but I don't expect you to remember that more than a minute; appearances will be against the truth of it. I used to believe in influence; I really believed that good influences make the world good. It's not true: that's why I have no ambitiousness left at all. In spite of that I want to go as high as I can, within my powers. And that's another thing, my powers-they're not what you think. I'm not a philosopher; not even a hack philosopher who chews over someone else's tangent and makes a little name for himself as a tangent-chewer. I'm not a philosopher or a political scientist or an economist or a historian. Nothing. A dilettante is all. What I mean is I'll never be a professional anything. I used to be a professional revolutionary, I admit it; I admit that's the thing that had me at the vitals; at the vitals is where it lost me finally. I was never more innocent than in my crafty plotful days; lately experience shows me how to sham purity of heart, so I'll go far. Far and high. Why do I want it if not to satisfy ambitiousness? if not to gratify a will for influence? I don't know. Maybe it's academic curiosity. A zoological inquisitiveness. I want to see how high and how far absolute rejection will take a man. By absolute rejection I mean absolute revulsion, absolute cynicism: in my amateur fashion I profess that. At revulsion I'm not a dilettante, I'm an expert. I want to learn how far and how high a man can go believing that the world is innately evil, without doing more than mere contributory evil himself. Call it an experiment; and remind yourself now and then not to confuse it with ambitiousness, which is not an experiment with an unknown outcome, but a commitment in which the results are antic.i.p.ated. If they let Jews be President in this country I'd aim for that; and I don't omit the possibility-there was Disraeli, after all, a more extreme impossibility. Meantime I'll take things s.p.a.ce by s.p.a.ce, at my own haste, which isn't the same as speed, doing a job at this and a job at that: the eviller the premise and the principle, the better for my investigation. You want to avoid illusions about me, you see what I mean? I have to go into the high life to look things over, and see how they rob and murder up there with clean legal hands. I've seen how robbery and murder are done down below; now I want to prove that the world is of a piece, top and bottom. I want to demonstrate how creation is an unredeemed monstrosity."

It was their wedding night.

Allegra said: "But what for?"

"Why bother, is that it? Everyone knows it already, is that it?-A meagre question."

"No," she said. "That's not what I'm asking. I'm only asking why be so mean? Enoch, you're mean"-at that moment establishing exactly the vocabulary and the tonality of the kind of affection-comradely and hearty and faintly plaintive-that was to characterize them ever after.

"Because," he said, "I'm a disappointed religious. I expected another species of G.o.d, why not? Before my birth (it's time you heard the facts): before my birth (the facts, properly selected, account for everything psychological), I contracted to lead a virtuous life if only I could be born into a world where virtue was possible. Never mind probable. Probabilities are practically the same as certainties. But when you say a thing is 'possible' you give the world a chance to change itself overnight. By saying 'possible' you agree to adapt to the way things turn out, even if they lean against you, you see that?"

"Go on with the story," said his wife, yawning.

"Now the next question is what did I mean when I said 'a virtuous life'?"

"You meant the Party without hierarchical totalitarianism."

"Too involved for an unborn infant."

"Nothing's too involved for you," she brought out with a suspect sweetness. "If something starts out uninvolved you fix it up so it ends involved. Look, there's a white hair. No, two! Right over your right ear. I'm going to tweeze them out, hold still."

"Age doesn't hold still. I'm ten years too old."

"I don't care, so was William, compared to me I mean, not that that's any recommendation. Age wasn't his trouble. -Tell the part about the virtuous life, will you? Hold still. Can't you talk without wiggling your head like a bear?"

"Would you like to hear a story about bears instead? Once upon a time there were Three Bears, and one was too cold, and one was too old, and one was just right, and his name was-"

"Shut up," she broke in. "I don't care about that, I want to hear about how you were going to live a virtuous life."

"His name was Nick," he finished.

"Oh G.o.dd.a.m.n."

"Exactly what I said I would never do."

"Hm?"-hunting with the tweezer's jaws ready to spring.

"d.a.m.n G.o.d. I even promised-ouch, I can't spare so many hairs, you said there were only two grey ones to go-"

"White. There are eight million four hundred and six billion, and all the rest pure scalp. I'll pull till I'm satisfied. Don't say Nick any more or I'll pull and pull. Go on."

"If you had a razor instead of a tweezer would you nick instead of pull?" he said meekly.

In response she gave a ferocious yank and came away with a snarl like mist. "Poor Enoch, you're going bald like a rocket. Just fleece or feathers all over. Puff and it's out and gone."

"I'm a very unattractive man. Unsuitable for a husband. I never planned to be a husband. You know I thought I would be a monk."

"Jews don't have monks."

"Precisely the problem," he acknowledged with enthusiasm. "I made a pledge: let G.o.d be the kind of G.o.d who would allow the sort of world in which it is possible to lead a virtuous life, and I would repay him by dedicating my days and every so often my nights to constant praise of his holy name. No G.o.dd.a.m.ns to speak of. A sort of friar I would be. After I grew up, of course."

"And then you grew up."

"No. Then I was born-look how you lose the chronology, you're not attentive. First I was born, and found the world the way it is, and myself a Jew, and G.o.d the G.o.d of an unredeemed monstrosity, and well, just as you said, Jews don't have monks, so it was easy to see something was wrong immediately, but so naive was I that I didn't despair or suspect-"

"Yes you did. Jews are cunning."

"-and in my simplicity I thought that whatever you come upon that seems unredeemed exists in this state for the sake of permitting you the sacred opportunity to redeem it. I used to have a crooked idea that man finds the world unwell in order to heal it, I had the presumptuousness of thinking myself one of the miracle rabbis. Charlatans and deviations those were, and as cunning as Methodist Bishops. But afterward I became wise, and learned how the world isn't merely unredeemed: worse worse worse, it's unredeemable,"

"You have no sense of humor," said his wife.

"That was meant to be a joke."

"All of that?"

"Yes."

The tweezer dropped to the pillow. "I don't like long jokes."

He laughed aloud. "And that's a short joke."

"I don't see why."

"Not seeing why is the point of the joke. Sometimes a joke is a joke only if someone doesn't know it's a joke."

"Oh Enoch! How mean you arel"

"How rich you are," he countered.

"I can't help it, can I?" But she was all at once infiltrated by a sulky meditation. Her gaze moved interiorly. "Did you see this afternoon how that small-minded Sarah Jean came without any gloves?-Just because it was a civil ceremony doesn't make it right."

"Civility was expected to be an attribute of the ceremony, not of the witnesses," Enoch observed.

"She did it for spite. If it'd been church she would have worn them with a decency. But my G.o.d, did you get an eyeful of William's work?-it looked as though any minute Sandy might have to follow up with a christening. If judges do that."

He said, "You'd rather it was Nick."

"Nick?" She was fearful; she was petulant.

"Instead of me. Instead of me."

"Well what's the difference? She still wouldn't have worn her gloves. Anyhow I settled long ago it wasn't going to be Nick."

"You settled it wasn't going to be me," he contradicted.

"But that was before."

"Before? Before what?"

"Before we gave up finding him."

"And if we find him now?"

"What do you mean now? Now there's a war. You don't find anyone in a war. William said so. You said so. War's the end of finding anyone."

"But if we did?"

She picked up the tweezer and bit the air with it. "I've given it up, I told you."

"It? It? And what do I read for it?" he demanded.

"Hope."

"Ah, that's something else! Hope isn't Nick. You give up hope, you don't give up Nick. Nick you don't give up, is that the idea?"

"I give up what I please, who knows if I'll ever see him again? So it doesn't matter. For G.o.d's sake, Enoch."

"It doesn't matter? What doesn't matter? It doesn't matter that you'll never see him again or it doesn't matter whom or how you marry as long as there's a certainty you'll never see him again?"

"For G.o.d's sake, Enoch. I can't follow any of that. You married me for the money so think of the money. Concentrate on the money and leave Nick out of it."

"All right. Out he goes. Put the child away."

"What do you mean, put her away?"

"In a school. Or whatever."

"A school! A baby three years old! And melancholy enough to begin with!"

"The point is you look at her and think Nick."

"Liar. You mean you do. All you think is Nick Nick Nick. It was supposed to be the money you cared about!"