Trust: A Novel Part 47

"But you were rescued all the same."

"Well, my father says expect the unexpected, that's how come," he affirmed. "We had to give up after a while because Dee was starting to holler, so we went into this Automat place and sat down, the whole nine of us, and my father was thinking maybe we ought to spend the money on the extra rooms, we had to stay somewhere, and all the time we were talking it over, there was this man. We didn't even notice him. In New York City you never notice anybody, and this man kept on sitting drinking coffee at a table and sort of eavesdropping. It was terrifically discouraging. In spite of everything my mother made a joke, she said we reminded her of the Children of Israel, we were so dis-Pursed, with no pillow for our wanderers' heads and no place to sleep. Then all of a sudden this same man that was drinking coffee comes up to her and says why not sleep with me, madam, if you people would like to I could set up these tents for you on this property I have. He said it was on this island that's called Town Island and there's no town on it, but if we came, right away there'd be a whole population. Then he told us about hiring Polygon's launch to come over with, because he had only this one little motorboat that wouldn't hold us all. He said if we didn't mind roughing it we could stay the whole week and he'd be glad to have the company."

"And you accepted?" I marveled. "Just like that, out of the blue?"

"Sure, we took the train right out to the boatyard."

"They weren't afraid? Your father and mother?"

"Of what?"

"Of a stranger. It might have been an ambush. He could have robbed them. He might have been a murderer. His whole idea could have been to fleece them."

"Not Mr. Tilbeck!"

"But they didn't know."

"My father says never turn down an angel of mercy. My father says trust in your fellow-man and you trust in the Lord."

I murmured, "That sounds very nice."

"But it's true! It hasn't cost us a penny since we got here, that proves it. It's much cheaper than any hotel. -See that sort of bend in the sh.o.r.e line up ahead? No, across." He pointed and listlessly I followed his finger toward the green. "That means we're practically there. It isn't taking very long, is it? Even without the motor."

But I was preoccupied with a meditation: Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck as angel of mercy. "It hasn't cost a penny?" I repeated.

"Not even for the groceries. Mr. Tilbeck bought everything. That was when the motor was still working. We cook things over a campfire, like cave people."

"He hasn't said anything about money?"

"You mean asked for it?"

"Like rent," I said. "For putting you up, for instance. Or for anything. Money in general, I mean."

He shot out a quick scornful whistle. "Mr. Tilbeck's rich. He's got tons of money. He's got this whole island."

"But he burns beds, washes in a brook, cooks in the open-"

"Well, he doesn't think it's worthwhile to rehabilitate the place. He told my father that. You see he doesn't really live there. He doesn't live there permanently. He's a traveler. He lives wherever he pleases. He has islands with old houses all over. He has an island right off Greece, right in the middle of the Mediterranean Ocean."

"Crete?"

"He didn't say its name. You know some islands don't have names. But he owns them all over. He's terrifically rich.

Somebody that rich wouldn't ask for rent, especially not from us. With nine of us it wouldn't be fair."

"It wouldn't be justice," I said. "Does your father believe that story?"

"My father says never look a gift horse in the mouth."

"That's new," I said. "That's one I never heard before. What about your mother?"

"She said it was bad manners to worry about anybody else's situation. She said we should just keep Purse-spective on our own."

"That makes sense too," I capitulated.

He spelled out c-e-n-t-s, and explained that his mother, being a Purse, insisted she was always full of this. "But my father told my mother confidentially one night that Mr. Tilbeck might be a counterfeiter," he informed me. "He has all this money. I saw it myself."

"Well, the question is did you see the minting machine?-To be fair, I mean."

But he had antic.i.p.ated me. "Harriet Beecher and Manny and I looked all through the cellar and couldn't find it. He might keep it on one of his other islands though. He might keep it on Crete. You know what my mother said?"

I was afraid to hear; I dreaded Purse-iflage.

"She said confidentially to my father that Mr. Tilbeck is a habitual liar."

"And they don't mind that?"

"My father says it isn't necessary to believe the word of anyone but the Lord. Mr. Tilbeck told Harriet Beecher he might buy her some new dresses before we go to Idlewild Airport. He might get Al an accordion. Al's dying for an accordion. He might get my father a brand-new traveling case."

"Maybe all that's a lie."

"We all saw the money," he a.s.sured me, and I had a mournful yet comical intimation of how they, in Purse-suit of the schnorrer's famous golden fleece, intended to fleece the fleecer. "Schnorrer," I must in spite of awkwardness here interrupt, was a sly gift from my stepfather, flung down in my presence for his own mischief and his wife's mystification, and chipped from a language which he had once elucidated to my mother (who hated it) as being both remarkable and homely; but equally she hated knowing that he knew it, on account of which he had sometimes slipped me a word or two of it-"di goldene medina," he taught me to call America, whether with or without irony I was then too young to estimate-and vulgarly she warned him that he might yet forget himself and use his mamaloshen in direct address before the Senators: at which he nodded with the gladness of spitefully-overlooked incongruity-"Aha! Parasites and spongers! Do-nothings! Swillers at the troughs of drunken lobbyists! Take Hundt, that schnorrer-if he leaned any farther to the right they'd have to fish him out of the Atlantic Ocean! Take MacElroy, another schnorrer cla.s.sique, with an absentee record as long as the history of the, the-gypsies!-Thought I'd say Jews, did you?" he cried and crowed, and the inimitable word tumbled into my possession to await its moment of attestation-which struck, surprisingly, in this boat that crossed a bay to take me to my father. I saw then, and with perfect conviction, the simultaneity and constriction of scope of the world's schnorrers-a Senator or two nibbling at this company and that, Tilbeck nudging, grasping, gleaming, menacing, the homiletic Purses out after the smell of convenience, cash, lodging, loneliness. Did my mother's money support them all? Did the blatant swelling of her investments, like the breathing of some gigantic horn-armored but entirely mythic creature-the gryphon, perhaps-nourish on the crest of their inhalations the whole dependent universe of schnorrers, the high and the low, the whole gratuitous grating ungrateful gratuitant but above all ingratiating company?-since, at least at first meeting, schnorrers are without doubt the most charming persons in any society, and attract deliriously before they prey. Did she, unawares, sway the companies that several of the most charming of all the Senators milked in return for certain insignificant exceptions, scarcely noticeable, in certain negligible bills? Or, to take another aspect of the same radiant herd, how many courtesies and generosities and canny gifts and little girls' dresses and rings for ladies and little boys' thingamajigs had she year after year unwittingly bought to please those charmers who chanced to please Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck? Plain that Connelly's account-books were the organisms on which now even this mob of nine lean Purses fed, and meanwhile-meanwhile? O shock of happenstance-curls of water poured off the oar-blades, and the boat without loss of tremor seemed not to move on the tremulous platter that moved beneath us.

"Why did you stop rowing?"

The boy had his fists secure in his lap; the wet paddles shone high in the air, dripping grandly. And there we were in the middle of the bay-not, so far as I could-see, a matter yet of land ho.

"We're nowhere near a beach," I objected.

"How do you know there's a beach?" he caught me up. "I didn't tell you there was."

"I a.s.sume there is," I said. "I was thinking of the footprint in the sand. Robinson Crusoe. Don't all islands have beaches?"-but if I had a.s.sumed a beach it was because of that other shipwreck in my brain, where early early and from the start I had figmented a sandbar the color of gold, and a yellow shoal glowering with mist, and rocking there a figure tugged and secreted like a sculpture by tide, or like the raised effigy on a coin of some overrun civilization, the lineaments of its caesar's profile swathed in undersea moss, the eye a rubbed freckle, the n.o.ble nose worn to a snub, conquest sea-dyed pale dead tan. My father's body lay in my brain, and in the same sea-vessel yet elsewhere on still another beach the body of my governess spread itself flat on a fiat rock, sporting motionless; and here is the lizard of my father's tread, crouching; and Palestine burning; while beyond, in the water, as they join, a book opens wings without lungs and drowns.

We sported motionless; the boy, the boat. "Bring down the oars. Let's go on," I commanded.

But he had stopped to look me over.

"What does he want you for?"

A question that knows its own answer is a lie. "Who?" I lied.

"Mr. Tilbeck. You didn't just go and invite yourself? He asked you, didn't he?"

"Well, not exactly," I said. "I asked myself. It's a story. You see I have this very rich mother. Not as rich as Mr. Tilbeck maybe, but still very rich. Extraordinarily rich. If you put all the people who live on her in a s.p.a.ceship the earth would be left a bare skull. And one of the things about my mother is this: she wants me to be free. -You care to hear this story?"

"Is it true?"

"Quakers don't lie."

"You're not a Quaker," he said.

"No," I said. "I'm a c.o.xswain. Some c.o.xswains lie and some don't. You want to know what my mother means when she says she wants me to be free? Bring down the oars or I won't tell."

"Tell or I won't bring them down."

"You're taking advantage," I warned. "I won't just sit here."

"Will you get seasick if you do?"

"I never get seasick."

He thought this over. "Mr. Tilbeck does. I told you. But not when he's got a motor. It's on account of this Meniere's Syndrome he has. He says it might be a psychological disease or else he was born with it. It makes him throw up after he's rowed awhile. He thinks it's the way your arms have to keep doing these circles sort of. You get a steadier ride with a motor. -I like to sit still in a boat, don't you? I like the way it goes up and down, don't you?"

"It's ant.i.thetical to progress," I said. "Bring down those oars. You've got them sticking through the sky. Suppose you dropped them? And lost them? Then what? We'd go up and down forever."

He wondered at me. "Are you feeling sick? You won't throw up?"

"Not me. Look, don't annoy. I'm not Tilbeck," and discovered in the act of p.r.o.nouncing it yet another he.

"I think you look like him," he said, and a demon lurched in the boat-it was my suitcase falling flat with a bang.

"He sent you to row for him? Then row," I yelled. "Everybody looks like everybody. Mankind is one."

Beautifully, he brought the oars down. "Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not."

"Where'd you get that?"

"Mr. Tilbeck sings it."

"You mean recites it."

"Sings it. Pit-eee," he sang, "this biz-ee mon-STER," he sang, "man-UN-kind," he sang, "NOT. That's the way he does it."

"To do anything you want to in the whole world," I said, my half of the bargain having been to tell my mother's meaning: "That's free."

He slapped the gregarious blades on either elbow-side-they cleft the water, churning spittoons of whirlpools. We skimmed, we fled. "Is that what you do? Anything you want to?" he asked.

"For instance," I said, "this summer all I wanted to do in the whole world was read newspapers, so I did it. And my mother said is that all you want to do? You call that being free? So I said all right what should I do? And then I said all right I'll visit all the islands in the world, so my stepfather got out his atlas, and I went to Majorca, Minorca, Iviza, For-mentera, Sicily, Rhodes, Cyprus, Formosa-"

"Crete?"

"-Crete being among the first I went to, then Buru, then Santa Cruz, Samoa, Guadelupe, Ellis, Staten, and plenty of others. And after all that there was nothing left in the atlas but Town Island. It's the only island in the world I haven't seen. Duneacres is the only house on the only island I haven't seen. Mr. Tilbeck is the only man in the only house on the only island-"

He intervened: "It's a joke, isn't it?"

"-I haven't seen. And since I'm the only person in the world who's visited every island in the world but one, Mr. Tilbeck-encountering me one day on Ellis Island, which, you know, is absolutely empty, a genuine desert island right off the East Coast of the United States-Mr. Tilbeck, you see, walked up to me with his coffee pot in his arms and invited me to live in a tent on his great decaying island estate-"

"I know about Ellis Island. It used to be for immigrants. We studied it in American History. You couldn't've been on Ellis Island. It is a joke," he said.

"You mean a lie?"

"Mr. Tilbeck said who you are. He told my father."

But I was sharp and quick: "He told your father what?"

"Who you are."

With my whole mind I considered it. And finally: "Who am I?"

"His daughter."

"He told your father that?"

"And my father told my mother."

Wondrous! Everything that Mr. and Mrs. Vand had striven to conceal from me all my life Tilbeck yielded in a word, and to anyone at all. What the Senators were never to discover the Purses already knew. What the trustee had paid and paid to bury, Tilbeck lightly disinterred to laugh at. What jeopardized the Amba.s.sadorship-my mother's great l.u.s.trous prize-fell like a glossy sc.r.a.p-a bus transfer, say, a snappy shiny ticket, of no more worth than that-into the Purses' casual pouch. He belittled the private not by making it gloatingly and efficiently public but by scattering it among those for whom it had no significance. If a tribe has not known gold, it will kick it underfoot. He was less blackmailer than all-around charlatan. He was a tremendous clown, and monstrous: he was audience for himself. Oh, he loved himself! He was amused!

"And did they," I lengthened my breath, "believe that?"

"Well, why should they?"

"You mean because he's what your mother called him? A habitual liar?"

"He can't have a daughter. He's a bachelor. He hasn't got a wife."

"He might have had," I said, "once."

"You don't understand. He doesn't get married." He looked at me oddly-as though, that is, I were someone odd. "I know what they mean but I can't say it to you."

"Can't you?"

"Not to you."

"But didn't you just tell me I looked like him? A daughter might."

"Everybody," he came back, "looks like everybody."

"You don't think I'm his daughter?" I pressed, amazed.

"Oh no no," he said, dropping his head toward a creak in the oarlock, "I know you're not. We all know it. But it doesn't matter to us. We're very liberal. My father says always be especially indulgent toward those who are most self-indulgent. My mother said it wouldn't be the decent thing to treat you like a Purse-ona Non Grata. So you see you don't have to worry about them. Some people you would have to worry about, but not them. I know what they mean. My mother said it was Over My Years, but I know what they mean. He only says daughter."

"But it's true," I said tentatively, afraid of what was true. "I am."

This pumped into him a sudden jollity, half shy, half aggrieved, as though an embarra.s.singly easy puzzle had just then come out absurdly right; our bow bounced on the huge triumphant splashes of his thrusts. "They said you'd be in on it! They said you'd corroborate the whole thing! They said he probably does it all the time, tells people daughter when he means-"

He stopped dead.

"Means what?"