Trust: A Novel Part 55

"Show 'em the power of the U.S. The mighty fist. Show 'em we're right behind the regime. They won't dare anything if we're behind it. That's the theory."

"p.u.s.s.yhead, come back," Stefanie said.

I had to wait while he let himself be gathered over her impatient glitter. She licked the peak of his nose, upside down, and seized his fingers and made him dabble them in the mysterious crevice of her collarlessness.

"It'll be a shoo-in for Vand," he finished, absorbed in Stefanie's small clever luring fist, indifferent to the mighty one behind the regime.

But all brightly the note of her voice struck: "Who's your father? How come that woman kept saying father? I never knew you had a father."

"She doesn't, stupid," her lover answered.

13.

Up to a point love is plagiarism. If no one had ever remarked a pair of lovers-how they dazewalk through the streets of cities in the shelter of their wound secret arms, how they dawdle interminably in their chairs, how they pick and slap at one another, how they stare and laugh, how they talk incessant trifles, how they stand at stalls studying the five-cent candies-the ritual art of flirtation would be unknown. None of it is instinct; all of it is imitation. Who invented it? Ask who invented the wheeL What spread it? Rumor, the mother of convention.

There are twelve kings' heads; but thirteen live on the island this night-an island well-named by the hopeful Dutch, who called it Dorp, supposing an inhabited future. So, being thirteen, we make the place a town after all-"the Last Supper," someone says (Tilbeck, probably), counting citizens; there is one seat short, of course. "Now if we can just get a betrayal going here, that'll eliminate one-" "The Holy Book should never be parodied," says Purse. But the atmosphere has altered: a shudder of thunder, miles and miles away; the vast table somehow askew, plundered, dirtied, piled with cartons; Mrs. Purse punlessly manipulating a can-opener; no fire; the xanthochroid children ludicrously feeding on tinned fish, while all around live fish presumably breed and brood out their underwater lives; the sunset spoiled; Dee unwilling to relinquish his chair for a fraternal lap; the two newest guests in a single heap consequently; Harriet Beecher returned in the same dress she left in; Tilbeck reduced in status from patron to non-patron of Purses.

And in the lovers too there is something ritual. It is as ritual for William's son to show virile embarra.s.sment as it is for Stefanie to spoon new jam between his lips. It is as ritual for her to bleat at a tiny blade of lightning as it is for him to deliver scientific consolation. Ritually Stefanie sways on his knee. Ritually she first Unlaces and then thieves his shoe and begins to run with it into the trees. Ritually-a little wearily-he runs limping after her. They penetrate the wood. Perhaps they kiss there; perhaps not. At any rate we hear them sc.r.a.pe and scamper; leaves already dust the ground in there; the hum of thunder brings a gust; they come out with red and yellow leaves shaken onto their hair, quarreling and calling animal names.' "You skunk." "You racc.o.o.n." "You moth-eaten." "You chewedup." "Dirty old bear. "Five-toed sloth." "Blind as a bat." "Gnat." "Nit." "Double that and eat it." "Triple on you." "You began it." "You did." "I didn't." "You did." "All right then I'll get you for it-" And once more the ritual swiftness is on, and no one's will at work: the patient a.s.saulted trees take them in and shoot them out: they dart and shriek in the immortal chase. Obeying art, the girl pursues the boy into the grove. Obeying art, the boy flees. Rites are always witnessed: the Purses watch, I watch, Tilbeck appears not to watch-his neck is stretched up, the bottle's neck is upside down, the funnel of one activates the funnel of the other-but all the same secretly watches through the ruby window of wine. A tree hides the girl, a gap reveals her, she stalks, she vanishes, she reappears, she is seen running, a great thick old trunk blots her out, her arms hug a thinner trunk (but she has stopped behind it, so that what we merely mortal watchers note is a little tree wringing its wild human hands), she runs again, screeches, embraces a mightier tree; its root grows out of her parted leaning legs. After her the tired buffalo lumbers, scolding. She heeds not him but the wood, and lets herself be caught. Kicking up the long red stems of big leaves, her tongue visible in the corner of her open mouth, simpering like a saint, out she steps to be claimed. He claims her. And here a single inquisitive scimitar-edge of light slices through the ruined and flattened sky, and picks out the two of them (but only one of them spent) emerging side by side, each dangling the other's shoes, barely touching shoulder to breast, wrist to neck. "A man died back there," Stefanie calls as they come.

"We know that," said Harriet Beecher: with the plainness of complacence.

"I think it's just too creepy-"

"And well you should." Tilbeck persuaded the wine from his mouth like a cornetist quitting his instrument during the chorus of violins-a temporary separation for the cause of art. "His ghost lives in that oak. The not-so-skinny one. The one you put yourself up against. You poked him in the bellyb.u.t.ton I think."

Purse said quickly: "No one knows who did it."

"This little looker did it," Tilbeck said. "Poked him in the bellyb.u.t.ton."

"Who killed him, Purse means," Mrs. Purse amended.

"Who kill Co' Robin?" Dee asked loudly, and went back to sucking out the wooden eye of a king.

"n.o.body. It was a suicide," Stefanie said. "This Turk just went and killed himself."

"Shut it, will you?" Her fiance had run himself out. He was breathing painfully, like an old engine. "What do you want to tell that for?"

"It was an Armenian," I settled it.

#x2014;They all turned to look at me: all but William's son. "That's what I meant," Stefanie said accusingly. "An Armenian. They have those funny black eyebrows right across their face. Why would a Turk want to kill himself? I could understand an Armenian. I mean if I had eyebrows like that I'd kill myself." And to William's son, clandestinely: "You're right about her. She knows plenty."

Throw heard and swelled. "We all know plenty."

"Aha!"-His mother pounced. "In times of plenty what Purse doesn't? But nowadays! Nowadays-"

"Not a nickel's worth. Didn't bring back a newspaper," Purse submitted. "Not even that."

"-we could do with a tiny bit of good will here and there. It isn't as though we weren't on the verge of foreign parts. It isn't as though you weren't a traveler yourself and didn't know about expenses. The poor child, you said a little dress, no hand-me-downs for her, only girl in a mob of brothers ... We counted on you, Mr. T.-"

"Count on the Lord," Purse said severely. "Never count on man. The unstable element is the human one. Never count on a human caretaker."-His wife, it seemed, had sufficiently filled his ear. "The Divine Caretaker keeps us always in mind," he finished; the notion made him brave but dismal.

But Tilbeck it made bright. "Right you are. As caretaker of that little commission I believe I'm a failure. Ah forgive it-a failure. Forgot to get you a dress, Harriet. Chalk it up to distraction of maritime composition. It drove out all garment thoughts but those of"-how deep, how insincere, his sigh!-"the Wet Green Garment of the Earth. We wrote to the world, this child and I."

"Mr. T. wrote," said Harriet Beecher. "Then we threw the bottle overboard. Nothing I thought of was any good."

"Seafaring notes about pirates," he chided her, "are redundant. Who's to find it but a pirate anyhow? And what good would that do? Poor fellow, be like looking in a mirror for him. It wouldn't enlighten. A very sad tautology." He spoke to Purse: "I avoid newspapers. Except to light fires with. There's a surf and sc.u.m of 'em in the house if you want."

Purse considered. "Look here, you put yourself out as a traveler," he said finally.

"I've been around. Right"

"A man of means."

"Means, you bet"

"And an owner. An owner? You own this land?"

This inquisition caused Tilbeck to elevate the wine once more. "Everyone owns the Dry Green Garment of the Earth," he purred after a moment.

"If everyone owns something no one owns it. That's why Purse is against nationalization of industry," Mrs. Purse noted, with no special relevance. And then, with particular relevance, "What a long swallow that was!"

"We should nationalize you, Mrs. Purse," Tilbeck said gallantly.

She took this haughtily and without pleasure. She meant to punish him for his impostures and his failed promises. Undoubtedly she saw in him now simply a man tainted by sentimentalism. He liked children, and what was that to her who made them? A caretaker on a little salary, what was that? Where was Harriet Beecher's new dress? And where the twenty bits of her own splendid new drill? And where poor yearning Bronson Alcott's dream of an accordion? And where Purse's alligator traveling case and the fourteen volumes of lateral femur development to be wittily inscribed Purse-stare et Price-stare? Ah, all prizes flew. Imagination. They had all seen the money. A petty larcener. A grand one, perhaps. She supposed the money was given him to keep the place in repair. For plaster. For shingles. For disinfectant Silverfish swarming everywhere. The kitchen a wreck. Burning the furniture bit by bit. Nothing was re-plastered, nothing re-shingled, nothing disinfected. He spent it any way he pleased. A betrayal. Bought friendship. Bought girls and women. Bought her. She saw a lecher on a little salary; a habitual liar, she told Purse; told Purse, then crept away while he sleep-wheezed, to put her spine on the cold night-sand-she, the mother of so many cradle Friends: only to be abandoned for a tedious Attachment. Mrs. Purse's meditations sprang out; her long gums curiously but potently revealed them. Full of the energies of an anti-sentimentalist, her reb.u.t.tal fell on me: "I'm not an industry," she retorted, all at once brilliantly literal.

Tilbeck hardly compromised. "Ah yes you are," and patted smooth Harriet Beecher's cotton-white, thread-thin bangs, which a wicked wind was disarranging. A terrible gesture just then: to lean a hand out like that. "You're a whole factory in fact," he obliged her.

"Don't bother that child," Mrs. Purse began, and worked her way toward inspiration; instantly she found it. "You seem to think a Purse is always good for a touch!" she yielded it up, but with a sadness-almost with a carelessness. Disenchantment was her worm. She was wearied.

Purse brushed away his wife's crescendo. "Ethel. Will you let me. Now look here. Either you do or do not own this place. Either you are or are not an owner here."

"Sure I'm an owner," my father said.

"He is not." Thus Stefanie-suspending a toothpick an inch from her readied teeth: she was absorbed in spearing tunafish out of a can. "What a roach to say he is," she muttered; then sniffed hard, as if the stuff might not be fit to eat Though daughter of a mother who had never had the profit of Miss Lamb's or Miss Jewett's, she did not often dine on democratic fare. Or so the p.r.i.c.kle in her nose suggested.

But Tilbeck had his answer. "I own myself," he said mildly.

"Then you should control yourself," Mrs. Purse advised.

"Right, leave it to you, perfect rule for a factory"-he roared this straight into Purse's untriumphant jealous scorn. "For a factory absentee ownership's no good. If you don't keep your eye right on it it gets away from you. You've noticed that, hah? You've got to be on the spot every minute or you lose what you've made, right?"

"Exactly," said brave Purse. "Never trust a caretaker. I've already shown that. The Divine-"

"Made a poor job of it too," Mrs. Purse intervened, in hope of avoiding what was likely to be a further exposition of the Divine character, or, more perilous yet, a divination of her own. "He doesn't keep the place up. Everything neglected, you just have to look around. Grounds a pure Hades. That broken fountain. Everything mechanical gone to rust-"

"Mildew in the library," Purse contributed, effectively deflected.

"-and gets paid for it, more's the pity. All that money-we all saw that money-and he doesn't lift a finger."

"You like what I lift, hah, Mrs. Purse?"

"Ah, pig," said Circe.

Purse dug on. "I say let's get to the record. It's been a falsehood. A fabrication all along. If you put yourself out as caretaker-"

"As caretaker he doesn't put himself out," Mrs. Purse loftily reminded him.

"Ethel. If you please. The guests of a caretaker would of course be trespa.s.sers. It seems to me we were inveigled into law-breaking. Deliberately inveigled."

"Now Purse," said his wife. "Don't be illogical. There's no reason they wouldn't let him have visitors. They may very well let him."

"All right. For the record then. They allow it? The owners? Comings and goings on the property?-For the sake of the record this is."

"There aren't any records," I heard myself contradict; and shunned a glimpse of William's brooding son. In me, meanwhile, a maze; depths; complicities.

"That's right," Tilbeck said. "This girlie's got it right. There aren't any records. Changed your mind, hah, girlie? First word you threw at me was records. Got the point now?-all that's a fake. The latrine in the ruined abbey, I told you. Figured out what's real and what isn't I see; got the taste I see. -I never said caretaker," he informed Purse.

"You don't put yourself out as caretaker?"

"No sirree. You don't catch me acting valet. Not to persons, not to places."

Purse speculated, then ventured. "Then what do you put yourself out as? There must be something."

"Roach," Stefanie said. "Nasty old roach. p.u.s.s.yhead, you didn't even let on there'd be roaches up here. p.u.s.s.yhead? Wouldn't Willie have a fit? People just going around saying they own what doesn't belong to them?"

Tilbeck vaguely studied her; she was plucking an ivory flake of fishflesh from the point of her toothpick. He watched her chew. "We settled that," he said indifferently. "A father. That's right. No more, no less. Same as Purse. I put myself out to be the equal of any daddy alive. That's all right, I hope. A father!" he ended.

Earnestly Purse emptied himself into the other's noise. "I'm sorry to hear you say that. Very sorry. No candor at all. I regret the example given."

"Example to who?"-but he kept his look for Stefanie.

"The children."

"Ah, those toadies!"

The toadies were listening alertly. Their heads in attendance composed a row of bleached skulls. Behind them a smudged sky palpitated. The transported fingerprints of a bureauful of government clerks moved steadily past the chipped chimneys of my grandfather's non-museum.

"Never mind," said Mrs. Purse, determined on consolation: "We'll be out of here before you know it. We'll be out of the whole Occident, in fact. Wait and see, Harriet Beecher'll be Stowed away in a pair of those flimsy Pakistani pantaloons they wear under their dresses over there before you can say boo."

"Boo," Stefanie gave out experimentally. "If you ask me, it's going to pour."

Purse continued depressed. "Taken in. Taken in," he announced. "I tell you I don't relish being taken in by a fellow with nothing but the breeze in his pockets. Fourteen volumes! Colorplates! Bibliography and Index! And then he doesn't even bring back a five-cent newspaper. Not even that."

"Right, me you don't catch at the papers," Tilbeck said. "What's somebody else's news to me? I'm my own Current Event, don't y'know." And amiably re-tilted his jaw for wine. When at last he brought his eyes down they came on me plain as marble. "You know how I lay off the papers, hah, girlie? Never go near 'em. Wouldn't swat a fly with 'em. She knows it. I keep out of the way of the papers, that's a fact."

"Two-faced," Stefanie flung out. "You just a minute ago said you use them to light fires with-"

"Sure, I use 'em to make things hot-right, girlie?"-Laughter of the usual sort.

A m.u.f.fled male voice humbly requested tunafish.

"Ooh, p.u.s.s.yhead wants a fish," Stefanie warbled. "Next thing he'll be wanting mices-and didn't I bet you we couldn't keep zooming back and forth for meals? See? I told you a great big p.u.s.s.yhead gets hungry in no time at all! And there's nothing in that ship but a quarter of a Hershey Almond Bar. Yum, yum, open up-" William's son obediently displayed his uvula, and toward it a laden toothpick came charging.

"I thought you society kids lived on canned pheasant," Tilbeck said.

Stefanie leered. "Watch it, because we really live on guts. The guts of roaches I mean."

Laughter not of the usual sort. Blooms proliferated from the marble. "You want to know what I light those fires for? To signal. A man on an island keeps a bonfire going day and night y'see, and when a ship finally turns up that's got a mind to take him off, you think he goes back with all those fancy captains and stewards and ship's bursars and big Hershey Almond Bars? No sirree. Not on your life. He sticks to where he was. He sticks to himself. You think he's been signalling all that time just to go and get stuffed like them, to get nice and dead and filthy like them? Not on your life. He took those newspapers and he made that fire, and it's just to show 'em what it is to own yourself. Show who you belong to. Me, I belong to me. Those captains who run the world, you know what they are to me? Valets. Believe everything they were brought up on. All those big lawyers, all those amba.s.sadors i) "Hilarious," Mrs. Purse commented bitterly, "lovely. Ask him how he gets to all those other islands he's supposed to be boss of if he's never rescued off this one. Rescued is right! He couldn't manage it on his own, hasn't got the hands for it. -Ask him if he could, just ask him! Voyager! A man who doesn't know a motor from a junk-heap. And feels it in his stomach if he turns an oar in an oarlock more than ninety degrees!-Rain," she finished wrathfully.

"Ouch, I'm hit, I said it would pour," Stefanie cried, the first to jump up. She slanted her head to show us all. There, violent in her dazzling cheek, a great clarity of a drop had broken. The ribbon of wetness fled upward into the puzzling caves of her nostrils, indistinguishable from the trail of a tear. "D'you always talk like that?" she challenged, wiping and wiping.

Purse darkly supplied the answer: "Always." But the question was not for him.

"Well I think it's dumb to talk like that It's really dumb. I don't go in for ghosts and dead people in trees and trees with bellyb.u.t.tons and people belonging to themselves and amba.s.sadors getting to be valets. All that's just stupid. Nothing but a silly bother. Hey, come on, let's get out of this mudbath-"

A force of winds pursued the early lone drops. Singly they knocked on leaves, then joined in companies, then made a streaming phalanx for descent. The Purselets tumbled cartons, seized the cereals, abandoned the cans, overturned the kings, and escaped ululating into Duneacres. But William's son followed cautiously after, hobbling in his unlaced shoes; saving his lit cigar in a fist inside his pocket; pecking tunafish from a stick; solitary.

In the dark house my father asked craftily, "She go in for anything at all, this kid?"

"Sports. She goes in for sports. Just give her a ball," I said.

"That's right. Just give me a ball," Stefanie affirmed.

14.

They said they had no ball. They said they had lost it in the water.

"Well d'you know how to play Rumptag? You don't need a ball for Rumptag."

They did not know Rumptag.

"How about Castlemain? You can use practically any old thing for a ball in Castlemain. Anything that rolls."