Trust: A Novel Part 5

I felt bare and cold and lone; I shivered in my thin slip. "Isn't it money he wants," I stated with no modulation at aU, "Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck."

The name was as desolate as some uninhabited strand.

"Not money," Enoch rapidly opposed, "it's you he wants. He doesn't talk at all of money."

"Hurry, hurry," cried my mother from the bed.

"Why does he want me?"

"I told you to hurry!"

"He's never wanted me before," I said.

Enoch, weaving his head like a schoolmaster, mused. "He heard about your graduation-he read it in a column. It hadn't occurred to him that you were grown-"

"Never mind," I said. "He couldn't have written that."

"All right," my stepfather capitulated. "We don't know his reasons. Will you go?"

"I thought I was going to London and Paris and Copenhagen and Rome."

"Will you go?" he repeated; and because I saw how his tongue, quick with resolution, glimmered cynically on his lips, I consented to surrender those shimmering capitals, London and Paris and Copenhagen and Rome; and I said I would go.

At this my mother raised her eyes: "Now we have it."

"Perhaps," answered my stepfather, and scrutinized the person in the looking-gla.s.s without mercy.

It seemed they were absorbed in one another, although they were not near and did not exchange their two heavy gazes; yet their colloquy was plain; in avoiding the response of gesture and look, they met again and again, as if in midair, conferring and devising, and taking a stand at last. It was a conspiracy: they stood, the two of them, Enoch and his wife, against me.

"And will it make a difference," I defended myself, "if I go?"

"I hoped," said my mother, griefworn, "you would always live freely."

"A difference to whom?" Enoch took up. "To your father?"

"Nothing can make a difference to Nick," my mother remarked faintly to herself.

"No," I specified, and felt them draw invisibly together. "To Mr. and Mrs. Vand."

"Oh," said my stepfather, "-as for that!"

But my mother was too intent to go on weeping. "You haven't told her, Enoch."

He clicked shut the lock belonging to his abandoned briefcase and twirled the k.n.o.b. "The princ.i.p.al religious tenet," he observed, "is that one does not dare to manipulate circ.u.mstance." Meanwhile his fingers deftly stalked number after number-he had not rid himself of the habit of the combination. "'I am the Lord thy G.o.d' means nothing else. -I believe the orchestra's finished," he noted finally.

It was true; the music had vanished. A babel of calls spiralled up the steps, wavering like flags or candles. "One o'clock," a voice swept up, "it's one o'clock." "But they haven't pet.i.tioned for a writ of certiorari," said another. "You'd better not," said a third, very far, "Mrs. Vand wouldn't like it." "Stephen Spender's bedtime," yowled the stentor from the bottom of the stair, "at one o'clock," and my mother's head, wild with heat or rage, fell back subdued upon the pillow.

"Enoch has been appointed Amba.s.sador," she burst out after a moment; and, although this was her great hour, the ambition of her years, she suddenly moaned-as if she had just been informed of his a.s.sa.s.sination.

8.

It was, as I have said, her ambition, for my mother was ambitious: a thing not usual among the rich, who have no aspirations. True, some few of them fly after fame of one sort or another, and some fewer still after good Works and love of men, which is what philanthropy, despite its granite art museums and bequests to second-rate universities, means. But for most, there is no use going out to seek one's fortune when one has been born with it, already made, under one's nose. And so most scions of acquisitive parents are mutants who cannot close the fist to grasp-their fingers are perpetually splayed, and their fathers' fortunes slip through. There are legal dams and dikes, to be sure, like my mother's trust fund, and lads with decimals as well as digits in the dikes, like William, whom my grandfather had early seen to be a youth of uncommon good sense, with the lucky exception that he was likely to marry my mother:-my grandfather saw them wed, then died of the relief. And some will spend a lifetime spending; which will in fact satisfy many. But there are those who are too imaginative to be shut up quietly in country mansions and counting-houses, raising heirs or horses or interest-rates; if an evil star has prevented them from seeking their fortunes, they nevertheless insist on seeking something. My mother was one of these.

She scoffed at solemnity and pageantry and men in high office (the election of a woman Senator shocked her beyond amus.e.m.e.nt, and she remarked that if we were to have women in government we should begin in the post office with femailmen); and the puns she made about what went on in the Cabinet were frequently obscene. But all this signified nothing; it was actually the obverse of her true feeling, and allowed her to dwell shamelessly on what she pretended to abhor. Like many Americans, she followed the schedules and tours and ceremonials of the British Queen minutely, and had come to know by heart the royal figure's public modes and private habits (tabloid-borne), ardently burlesquing and sneering at every hat, trip, speech, and birthday at Balmoral-but the satire was an excuse for pa.s.sionate study, and the pa.s.sion was the end. "All that money," my mother said stalely, "to pay for a useless inst.i.tution! They could build twenty schools a year with it, but the English are so sentimental they'd starve themselves to death to feed the gullet of a parasitic survival"-her asperity hid her delight in every new account of the Queen's duties and her keep. And one year when a movie star married the reigning prince of a duchy the size of a chickenyard, my mother pored over radiophotos of the wedding rites and hooted joyfully at the immense vulgarity of everyone's curiosity: "It's only an Irish girl married to an Italian in a Catholic ceremony-it's as common as peas in any immigrant neighborhood!" she sn.o.bbishly-dismissed it-but she knew how many pearls were sewn into the bodice of the bridal dress.

I will not say that my mother wished to be Queen: but she wished for something that America could not give her. The trouble was the middle-cla.s.sness of her home country-she had tried to be proletarian and had failed, and not even good family (my mother's mother was third cousin to Theodore Roosevelt)" and much money can produce an aristocracy in America-we do not have the style, our palaces are dated nineteen-twenty, and our castles are imported piecemeal. The egalitarian temperament is content with Presidents and Secretaries of Commerce or the Interior, and glad enough to see law courts run in a businesslike manner, wigless: the egalitarian temperament has its own notions of n.o.bility, which it confuses with efficiency, so that in America the elite (whether generals, corporation executives, or Secretaries of State) are merely those who have more work to do, and more decisions to make, than anyone else. But an Amba.s.sador is not like any of these. A President must represent the Common Man, but an Amba.s.sador may not. He is expected to cultivate the influential and the aristocratic; he is accredited not to other men in their offices, but to monarchs in their trappings. Hence the early republic, scorning kings and courts, sent abroad only envoys and ministers of medium rank, and it was not until the final decade of the last century that Congress authorized the making of Amba.s.sadors. It gave us a borrowed taste of oligarchy. And it sufficed as an ambition for the rich. All this I had long known from my mother.

She was fulfilled. What lay ahead of her now was the prospect of becoming a great lady. Perhaps she intended to grow more haughty and more sedate and end as one of those queer expunged Americans whom European living fossilizes. Or perhaps she merely believed her traveling days were over, and she had at last attained that Europe of power and beauty which she for years had vainly pursued in the courtyards of its fatigued cities. Or, further, she might have thought of the amba.s.sadorship as a kind of ideal mission, in the Roman style (she lately preferred the straightforward Romans to the squabbling overintellectual Greeks), with all the world a province in need of enlightenment from a central culture. Nevertheless she had arrived, whatever her conception. Enoch had been to see the President; Enoch had been appointed Amba.s.sador. They agreed that it changed everything.

And yet she wept. She was like those piteous beasts of legend, humans whom a bad sprite has transformed into pigs or dogs or swans-but for their memories they are all animal, and yet they weep for the glory of what they have been. I suppose it is the same when we are old, and learn that some spell has trapped us-our fair strong able selves!-in an aged and hideous body which cannot possibly belong to us-which has likely been stolen for this unspeakable purpose from some crone or dotard; and this is why the blessed die before they are thirty. For my mother, then, it was a moment of incredible trans.m.u.tation and conversion-nothing would ever again be what it was before.

Nor would Enoch. Enoch, as I have said, was messianic. He came out of the heaven under the compulsion of circ.u.mstance. His nature was metamorphic, which is another way of saying that he was adaptable, and took his resurrections lightly. He had something in him of the refugee, which was absurd, because he had been born in Chicago. But he was both visionary and resourceful, one of those "interior" refugees of the kind which America throws off from time to time, adventurers who seem always to be fleeing some impracticable environment and the persecutions of ordinary life, who turn up all over the world practising the cult of a single idea. If they do not swim the h.e.l.lespont, like Byron or Leander, they will attach themselves to some craving or pretension equally mystic and rigorous-a hero, a book, a theory, a woman. Enoch professed himself a skeptic, and yet he believed in mysteries of all sorts, and reverberations from every direction, and had his own pantheon of saints, G.o.ds, angels and demons, all of them intensely political. He had Alexander and Napoleon, but he also had Lycurgus and Gandhi. What he had them for no one exactly knew, least of all my mother, who now began to joke a little in her bed, gradually getting better. She called him Disraeli in the mornings and in the evenings Moses.

They spent many hours shut up in the sickroom, dining from trays and mumbling together inaudibly. Not another word was said, to me about Europe. And yet it was always Europe they were talking of; their room and the sounds that occasionally came from it vibrated with schemes for foreign excitements. But often there were long periods when they did not speak at all. My mother slept, and Enoch read. A young man came every day with a carton full of books-once he pa.s.sed me where I lay in a chair on the terrace, and I saw one of the t.i.tles. It was a history of the Empire of Charlemagne. I thought of him as a messenger or delivery boy merely, but he appeared to be a secretary also, for one morning Enoch led him out into the sunshine and, pulling at the ta.s.sels of his bathrobe, began to dictate; it was a survey of agriculture, full of statistics and data on crop rotation and the erosion of soil, and how many heads of cattle, and how many inches of rainfall. The young man propped his notebook on his skinny knee and put everything down in a legible longhand with astonishing agility-his pen streamed. Now and then Enoch stopped him-"Now read back that last"-and the young man fled down a column of numbers in a voice as weak as a reed until Enoch said, praising, "That's right, that's right," blowing on a bit of paper he kept in his hand, as if to make it perfectly clear that this was no ordinary secretary, and that he himself was to be congratulated for a lucky man.

I did not see my mother very much during these days. She had settled down to. the business of recovering from what Dr. Leverheim, alarmed at the unexpected severity of her illness, had left off calling a cold: he now termed it a "virus," and increased his fee accordingly. Once when I heard her stir after her long morning nap I knocked on her door and asked to visit; but she would not admit me. She did not want me there. She plaited her fingers through her ruined hair, distraught, and sent me away. I felt she did not like to look at me.

On that same afternoon William's son telephoned. "I hear Mrs. Vand is worse."

"No," I said, "she was, but now she's better."

"I'm glad to hear it," he said without interest. "The papers are full of your stepfather's appointment."

"Yes," I acknowledged.

"Do you think he'll get it?"

"Certainly," I said. "The committee hearings are purely routine."

"I suppose you'll attend them."

"No," I said, "I'll be away."

"But you don't embark until September. You can still make Washington."

"The trip is off," I told him. "I'm not going to Europe. I'm going to the country instead."

"What a shame. I meant to send you a seeing-off present."

"A basket of fruit?"

"My father's suggestion exactly. But no, I hadn't given it any thought yet."

"Now you needn't at all."

He laughed slightly. "I want to apologize, you know. For that business about the check. I expect I made Mrs. Vand out for a criminal."

"Or yourself for a prosecutor," I suggested. "Forget it."

"Look," he began, "my father told me about that money."

My mouth went suddenly dry. I let the silence gather; I had nothing to say.

"h.e.l.lo?" said William's son.

"I'm here. Yes," I said.

"The money," he persisted. "I found out where it's going."

"Your father's too discreet," I demurred, "to have told."

"He didn't want to. In fact he refused to."

"But in the end he did."

"He was awfully reluctant."

"He did though."

"I'm afraid I badgered him into it. He broke down finally."

"He's not like that," I said apprehensively. "He doesn't give in."

"I never thought so myself. But that's neither here nor there." His thick cautious breathing crackled like static in the wire. "It's strange. You know she's been sending it for years to a place on Town Island. It's for the upkeep of an old estate."

I echoed him without understanding. "An estate?"

But he disbelieved in my ignorance. He said suspiciously, "Your mother's property. Your grandfather's place. Where she was brought up."

"My mother has no such property," I objected.

"My father told me," he said, settling it. "It's a sort of museum now."

"A museum?" I said in the same tone.

"Oh, it's not in actual operation. It never really was. Part of your mother's trust money was earmarked for it. The trustee was supposed to set it up. Look," he interrupted himself impatiently, "you know all this, don't you?"

"I never heard of it," I said truthfully.

But the guilty static which continued to measure out his hesitation was an accusation. "You know it all," he declared, and carried on. "It was supposed to be a museum, but the thing got managed badly. The money's for a caretaker they have now and again. He goes out there every once in a while to clear away the brush and start up the plumbing. The chimney's fallen. There are weeds growing up through the kitchen floor. The place is a ruin."

I pondered and was still; between us the wire soughed.

"And it used to be worth a hundred thousand dollars," said William's son.

"William told you that?"

"I tell you he told me all of it."

"All of it," I repeated doubtfully, docilely ("all" was Tilbeck, Tilbeck was all), and in an instant, by a clairvoyant inspiration, in a vision of sympathetic comprehension, I was certain that William had told none of it.

Nevertheless I went along with it. I rounded it out. "Did he say what sort of a museum it was going to be?"

"He said a museum, that's all. According to the terms of the trust."

The terms of the trust: this already familiar phrase, humming with threats, now hung before me brilliantly, as though freighted with imagination. At that moment I thought William wonderful. William as fabricator and fabulist, William as author of a ruse! "They show the skeletons of whales," I triumphantly supplied. "And species of shrimp, in green bottles. A marine museum," I exclaimed, elated by perception, elated by invention.

"I knew you knew!" said William's son.

Privately I regarded it as fantastic that my imbrication upon William's construction, conceived in irony (it was my father I saw as a marine creature), should touch on the actual with all the delicate tenacity of a bivalve rooted in the shallows. A museum: and then, behold, I had made of it a marine museum-a thing not unlikely, for I had heard how my grandfather Huntingdon had furrowed through all the world's waters, a seafarer upon the luxury decks of ocean liners, and how, moreover, he had steamed eastward as far as the Indies to buy my mother's and William's wedding-present. Well then, a marine museum! And why not?-and "I knew you knew," William's son said again. "It's how I got him to tell. I said I'd get it out of you if he wouldn't He didn't want that!"

William would hardly want that, thought I, since the tale William had given his son was no tale I knew. "I'm not easy to get things out of," was all I said-though fleetingly I speculated on just such a scene: William's son persuading, myself unyielding but secret in the chance joy of watching him persuade: the stern but remarkable bone of his nose and the imaginary helmet being all his means while all my admiration. I should not have objected to such persuasion, and I deviated sadly into a fresh summoning of his "encore un peu," murmured on the terrace into a yielding ear that had no French, but had the round beauty of a wreath instead.

"Neither is my father," he pursued, and, while I wondered-"easy to get things out of, I mean. Because he's in them."

"In what?"

"In things." He gave a little cough that came through the filter like a far queer birdcall. "He told me. Oh, he's in things, all right. I suppose you know it. He's involved is what I mean. I couldn't believe it. You know"-again the cry of the bird, cough or perhaps scanty laugh-"I always thought my father's nose was absolutely clean. Imagine, it's what I always thought. You always think that about your own father," he concluded hoa.r.s.ely.

"Yes," I said, "you always do."

"It's funny how you find things out."

His smitten gravity called for a spectacularly original utterance. I changed ears nimbly. "Eventually," I observed, "everything comes out into the open."

He sounded positively chastened-the grand great buffalo with his head down, not for b.u.t.ting but for bathetic shame. "It was awfully fine of you not to say anything the other night," he burst out.

This puzzled me. "When do you mean?"

"In front of Stefanie. I don't say she's derived from a band of angels herself, but it's nothing I'd want her father to know. Not right now, at any rate. It really mattered to me," he wrung out gratefully. "You were really fine."

"Don't mention it," I said in a parody of neutrality, and we talked a little more, until it became quite plain that he was not going to ask me to go to the movies with him, or anything in that line: so I hung up soon enough.

Meanwhile I smiled to myself. In what fabrication or tale of shady dealings the guileless William had implicated himself it was beyond me to guess. It was enough to know that, for the sake of my mother, he had put off his son: and he had put him off with a lie. And yet not really, if what he had said were to be taken as metaphor and not invention. For the museum on Town Island, looked after so a.s.siduously by my mother's checks, was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: and a man can be said to be a museum. Surely my father, const.i.tuting present evidence of a buried time, was a sort of museum-he housed matters which had to be dug after, collected bit by bit, and reconstructed. And William, as curator, had determined that the museum was to remain closed to the public, closed even to his son and prospective law partner. Whatever it was he guarded he must have considered either very horrible or very fragile-perhaps both, as, for instance, a shrunken head. He would do anything to prevent its exposure; he would even declare (if it might in some fashion appear helpful) that he was a headhunter himself.

But it made me hesitate. William as headhunter or trafficker in imprudence, William as liar, was unimaginable: here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they are always fict.i.tious. And yet he had defrauded his son of knowledge; what difference if it were the knowledge of evil? It was perhaps the first falsehood poor William had ever discharged in all his life. I could no longer regard him as incorruptible. The touch of greed carried far, it seemed; my father's touch carried far. It was not possible to conceal or elude it without defilement. I thought how money-l.u.s.t sp.a.w.ns deceit even among mere watchers or bystanders, and saw my father as owning some iron G.o.d or demon nourished by the taste of purity and panting after innocents with his long iron tongue, licking them to rust and corrosion at last. This was one of the creatures, neither legendary nor extinct nor caged, who roamed about the halls of that museum which William had fearfully closed to the public, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck's museum: the cost of the exhibit was too high, and the admission price was ferocious. What you paid was yourself. In order to get in you had to join the bad and dirty things on display: you had to change and be one of them. And William, who had entered and seen and learned how the rust of iron decays on the hands, and the rust of truth in the mouth, would not permit his son to enter, see, or team.

Though I pitied William, I continued to smile: in trying to preserve his son's illusions (that man was not depraved, that no Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck existed), he had pa.s.sed himself off for a cheat and a crook-and broke thereby the last illusion his son had retained in the world.