Trust: A Novel Part 8

"The arrogance of that station driver!" she cried, thrusting open the gate. "He left me at the bottom of the hill, bag and all. The road wasn't good enough for him because they ration his tires! Lord knows I paid him enough, and the worst of it is he's right, there isn't a decent road from here to ... The Garden of Atropos!" she broke off, wheeling round to confront me. "Put that thing down. She shouldn't be allowed to play with that, Anneke, she'll slice herself in two."

I had found a sickle under the rosebush and was swiping at the gra.s.s with it.

"Put it down," said the Dutchwoman obediently, "you will behead someone. Was the accident very bad, madam?"

"Well, the chauffeur had a concussion, but the trip back on the train was worse. I don't know which was thicker, the soot or the mob. There must have been a dozen people in the one compartment-half of them were Algerians. It was like riding in the coal car. I'm dirty as an Arab myself. How I hate these French trains! They're worse now-if you can imagine it-than before the war."

"And Armand?" inquired my governess.

"I went with him in the ambulance. They had me filling out forms all the way to the hospital. I didn't have a scratch on me, but it didn't matter-they have a form for everything, you know-and all the witnesses had to sign too. But they might almost have questioned Armand as me-believe it or not, he was conscious all the way!"

The Dutchwoman slipped the little scissors back into the pocket of her smock. "How strange," she murmured.

"Oh, but a brain concussion doesn't necessarily knock you out, you know," my mother declared with the authority of one who knew no more of medicine than to daub iodine on a skin-sc.r.a.pe.

"No: I meant about Armand. He is always so cautious."

"I know, and it's a nuisance when you're in a hurry. The roads south were full of military traffic, and he wouldn't pa.s.s-"

"They will keep him in the hospital for long?"

"I didn't have time to inquire-I had to find out about the insurance, it's all so complicated over here. It kept me dashing from one end of Paris to the other, and I couldn't make head or tail of it anyway, so I wired William-my lawyer, you see, in New York. He'll work it out somehow. As it is, I'm two days late getting back, and all on that chauffeur's account. I didn't want to miss driving to Zurich with Enoch. He hasn't left yet?" she finished anxiously.

"No." My governess shook her head gravely. "Mr. Vand is here. He is in the house."

"I can't say how glad I am. I need to talk to someone sensible. I've been hara.s.sed-actually hara.s.sed. That man lay there on that stretcher and just kept glaring and glaring up at me from out of those bandages they'd wound him in. It was terrible. He couldn't get out a word of course, but it was an accusation all the same. And afterward he blamed me right to the doctor's face."

"I have never seen a better driver," said Anneke, affecting deep interest. It appeared she very much wished to please my mother; she had put away all her insolence. "He sits behind the wheel with great confidence. I had often noticed it."

"He had no confidence to speak of just before we crashed, let me tell you! He was jittery, and that made me jittery-"

The Dutchwoman wondered. "You?"

"Well, at the rate we were going it was plain we'd never get back in time"-my mother seemed to hesitate-"so I made him shove over and I took the wheel myself."

"But madam has not a license!" the Dutchwoman exclaimed.

"That doesn't mean I can't drive, does it?" my mother retorted. "The fact is, that chauffeur did everything he could to get me in trouble."

"But if it was you who was driving," began my governess.

"Exactly. If it was I who was driving it was all my own affair. Especially since it was I who had hired him, and since he was hired to do what I told him. It was my own affair entirely. That's precisely what I told the police."

"The police!" screeched Anneke.

My mother indulged in a sly silent smile of triumph. "They insisted on arresting me," she continued proudly, cleaning the smudge on her chin with her glove, "although I carefully explained that I supposed I had plenty of insurance. They weren't interested in any of that, you can imagine. The issues didn't concern them."

"The issues?" my governess echoed. She stood up, genuinely agitated. "But Armand with his head cracked, and you without a license, and the auto in what condition-"

"Disintegrated," said my mother promptly. "You talk just like them, Anneke, I believe all you people over here suffer from the authoritarian personality. It's because you've tolerated kings for so many centuries. You don't have the revolutionary spirit. You're colonials in your own back yard. The American and Soviet Revolutions changed everything for everybody at the two ends of the world, but I can't see that the French Revolution made any difference at all for Europe-the police still act just as though they're secret agents for Louis the Sixteenth. Which is exactly how I treated them."

"The American interpretation of history," the Dutchwoman noted stiffly.

"The American interpretation of the European character," responded my mother. "When they got me to the police station I gave three thousand francs to every uniform in sight, including the sweeper-they certainly believe in egalite and fraternite when it comes to distributing francs!"

"Ah, madam has the true revolutionary spirit. Madam buys her liberte," said Anneke, turning her caustic eyes on the concierge's husband, who was climbing down his ladder.

My mother laughed resentfully. "I certainly didn't intend to get stuck in a foreign jail. I doubt whether Enoch or William could have done anything to get me out, once I was in, and poor William hates his clients to become involved in scandals, even overseas, it's so bad for his office." Her mouth grew tangled with intrigue and pleasure. "Even so," she pursued, "there were stories in all the Paris papers yesterday morning. French reporters are very gay, I'll say that for them. They have the virtue of exaggerating the worst-it is a virtue, you see, because then the truth is always such a relief afterward. Half of them said Armand had a broken neck and was already more than dead, and the other half described me as a big American social criminal, whatever that means. It's an awfully good joke, I think, especially if they meant socialist criminal-I'm never sure about French adjectives. You know," she said, looking round for a chair and finding me in it, "there was a French edition of Marianna Harlow-it sold rather well. Anyhow it's true socialism is still popular over here, although it's poison at home. -Get up, dear, and let me have that seat, I'm exhausted. Here, I'll show you my picture in the paper..."

There were two photographs, one the familiar portrait with its wavy points of hair fringing her brow, which occasionally appeared on the third page of the New York tabloids-her favorite likeness, taken soon after her marriage to Enoch, displaying what she liked to call her "autobiographical eyes," the lids very thin, the pupils round and wild as thrown dinner-plates, belladonna-big and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with notoriety, the lower cheeks with their sweep of hollow too general to pa.s.s any more for mere girlish dimples-my mother the in-her-thirties debutante, adventure-broker, scandal-seeker. "That's the one I gave them, because I was practically invisible in the other," she maintained, "and it was only fair." She measured out her image complacently between two forefingers. "Look, you'd hardly know there was anyone sitting inside the cab, it's so shadowy. And here, all around, are their motorcycles." It appeared to be a photograph of her arrest: Anneke and I vied to see the dot of my mother's face at the rolled-up window, blurred and light-blinded through the gla.s.s, peaked at the chin under a blunt excited snout, and four gendarmes, two severe, the third grinning, the last sucking his lips like the ideaman for a prairie posse, the thicknesses of their thighs slammed against the ma.s.s and maze of their trembling motors.

I asked if there had been sirens.

"Ah, no, they don't have any," my mother told me sadly. "But there was plenty of other noise to make up for it. A crowd of adolescents kept yelling 'meurtriere' at me all the way."

The Dutchwoman, bewildered, was still studying the photograph. "They took you to the commissariat like this, in a taxicab?-"

"Oh, no, this wasn't when they arrested me, it was when they let me go. I had to catch the train at Saint-Lazare, you see, and so they gave me a motorcycle escort from the commissariat."

"For only three thousand francs each!"

"That's not why," my mother protested. "It was all their own idea. I believe they think it's the custom in America, for celebrities."

"Celebrities," my governess repeated blankly.

"People of reputation. Oh, not me," said my mother, gratified, "after all they don't know me here. It must have been on my husband's account. And you supposed he had no importance!" she brightly charged. "The truth is his recent work has made him moderately famous-at least in Paris, where they read the papers. You see they managed to get Enoch's name into it too"-she pointed to two long columns, grim with italics-"it's very amusing. They call him the American Saviour who raises the dead without reviving them."

My mother lengthened her neck with a quick little twist and released, upon the margins of her smile, one of those high plumed cries of hers that occasionally pa.s.sed for an extreme of mirth or token of a private journey into some unbelievably comic and raucous netherworld: it was not laughter, certainly, but rather a Dante of laughter, a guide to ghosts and goblins too funny to contemplate with ease. Out of sorts, the Dutchwoman nevertheless imitated her-it was quite outside of her intention, for her pink face coa.r.s.ened with displeasure. She stood fawning in the gra.s.s, a little bent with the habit of covering scorn, rigid as mahogany and as redly brown, like a newly-set telephone pole bristling with invisible electrical signals. But my mother continued remote-"What a lovely smell," she said, "like fire, or the smell of the sides of horses": it was the pile of hedge cuttings, not sweet but joined by the sweetness of the roses rotted underfoot, and still green-thick and glistening with syrup. My mother's wide and sybaritic Chinese sleeve, hung from the chairback, at last disclosed her arm, gliding out cautiously as a white eel slipping downward; she lowered it until the fingertips barely discoursed in the gra.s.s. A crest of little hairs lay beaded with pellets of grey soot. She sat resting and immobile, an exile from the palace of event: she looked all terra cotta, the knuckles and creases grainy; this vaguely-haired pale dirt-fleeced limb dangling languid and long, almost like another neck, upside down, for the face secreted in her palm and the medusa-scalp of her wavering fingers; the hidings of her gape-mouthed sleeve bundled and tumbled with loose-flung folds and skews; every part captive and quiescent, stunned by unknown charms, dipped and spilled, leaning, invaded anyhow by vitality, a liquefaction above all fixed. She sat and was shape: an abstraction, theory, and ideation of shape. And the Dutchwoman also, duplicating her through duplicity-so that side by side, the standing figure ankleted by gra.s.s, the seated figure with fingers dabbling in gra.s.s, the two of them grew like old vases out of the ground. Their lips were stained; my mother's with illusion, Anneke's (I fancy now) with the opposite-she was intent on getting on my mother's good side, and traded smile for smile and look for look with comfortable cynicism. "There's Enoch," began my mother, listening, but she made no move to rise. "That's Joe and Hank too," she said; "have they gone on like that all day?" "Yes, since morning," my governess replied. And they wove their glances through conflicting breezes toward the house. My mother's rings blazed. "They called me 'meurtriere'-that's jumping to conclusions!" she exclaimed, and reached out to tap me with a jewel-freighted hand-"it means murderess, you know. As if I'd managed to kill the fellow!" she told me in her clearest voice. Still it was not so clear as those other voices, if one chose to hear them, gnawing in the garden-like flocks of pigeons they raised a rustling and could be noticed, or could not. It was by now a matter of will. I could not tell if my mother heard. The laughter was still bright in her remembering face, and the thick breathing of the cut boughs below the hedge seemed to cage her. "I'll go and tell Enoch you're here," I said, starting to run-but no, she stretched and caught me and swept me with her rapt eyes: "No, no, I'll simply sit and wait awhile. It's a smell like horses, or like Are. Someone's trampled the petals, they're brown as grease."

The Dutchwoman circled her. "The concierge," I heard her begin, but she went not a word farther.

"Like horses, I mean when the sun is hot on them, like fire," my mother said, brilliant with imagining. "The concierge spoiled the roses?"

"No, no, something else..."

"No one spoiled them. They fell by themselves. It's too late for roses on bushes," said my mother, restless although she did not stir, only let the shadows re-arrange themselves in her s.p.a.cious sleeves and draperies: then it was the sun, not she, who moved.

She was struck and cracked by dazzlement. She smelled joy like gunpowder or rich ether-each deadens with its spiralling and ringing, yet no one can resist them: we are blasted and sung by one or the other in our lives. Therefore she arched her arm and withdrew it, aware just then how she startled and adorned that place; she gave out zealous energies and ornaments. "How I shook up that crowd," she a.s.serted, but softly: she was as exhilarated after scandal as an arsonist after some great gloom and conflagration; she had had her burning. Yet a thread of greed hung in her eye. It was not enough. I could feel the world shudder in the garden then, and shimmer in the roseless bush, like a great quick wing; it seemed to rush against our beaten eyes, and my mother, helpless, closed her lids in agony for its pa.s.sing. She could not keep it long; soon its sense and odor vanished, nothing lured it any more. Then she would invent new diversions to pierce its sudden tail and trap its silken feet. For my mother really thought the world was a bird to be pursued with audacity and pleasure, and she deemed herself a huntress, and tipped her arrows with fabulous coins. And she fashioned immense and brilliant scenes over which she ruled poignantly and without justice, a picaro or lady-rogue all fantastic, among crowds, fabricating event, dining on the heart and bowels of this wild splendid bird which was the world. My mother believed that the world existed to be consumed by the rich and leisure-gifted. She chose travel and scandal and worse, for snares; but everything failed her, no enchantment or blow of recognition astonished her for long, experience evaded her, and that which she contrived, through bribes and police and whatever accidents or whims overtook her, through whatever scheme or outcry, through pretenses and declarations of changed philosophies, turned dry in an hour. Ah, my poor mother, she was prompt to dare, but her dares withered as promptly. Not then or afterward did she dream that the bird of the world never lights, while we cast for it, on human shoulder. If it comes to rest at all, it is when the hounds are silent, and silently it roots in flesh its golden claws, so that afterward we have only those ecstatic scars, in place of incredulous memory, to show. But even as she sat, the Paris papers growing stale in her hand minute by minute, yesterday's climax old and already out of date, the very photographs tickled into period-pieces, I saw joy die away in her. She had no work in the world. Desire stung her face, and she jumped up and would have run toward Enoch's voice, but all at once was altered and stood instead and listened. I listened too, and my governess, and the concierge's husband lumbering toward us from the sculptured hedge. He dropped his shears on the gra.s.s where I had dropped the sickle and the two blades briefly fenced. "Ah, those lists," my mother murmured, "he'll get nowhere with those lists. No one sees how hard he works, shut up in there. He's better off, you know, in the field," she said, using the last words expertly to show she by no means meant a meadow, but rather some closed busy place where conscientious toil could be witnessed and rewarded. "Sometimes I think he doesn't know how to push himself. He gets so wrapped up. He gets involved," she concluded. "Listen to their droning. As though all that meant anything any more, except to the relatives," she said, sighing into the continued sigh of Maidenek, Treblinka, Chelmo, and the sobs and soughs of those others, Sovibar and Mauthausen, Dachau and Belsen, Auschwitz and Buchenwald-the bitter sounds twisted slowly like fumes-"of course the things that went on in those camps, they've no place to ship them to-Oh look! A duck actually!" she broke off chastely. "That foolish old man's carved a duck out of the top of..."

We all turned and squinted into the glare of late afternoon. Already a wanly realized moon, ghostly in a sky still luminous with day, peered out, although the sun was barely below the nearest roofs. Over the tall hedge the duck rode, large-billed, verdant, eyeless. It seemed not an insect breathed just then, and nothing cared to move, only the concierge's husband, who vacantly caressed his mustache-the voices had taken everything prisoner, and had strangled the wind, and with the deliberation of an evil bellows sucked and blew, until Buchenwald, Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau, Maidenek, Mauthausen, Treblinka and Chelmo (over and over and over again) at last lost reason and meaning, and grew more and more unintelligible and inane; and the garden was choked with nonsense.

"My bird cannot fly."

But my mother did not hear, and the concierge's husband said again in his cryptic country dialect, "She must stay always there in the bush. I have her better than a cage."

My mother vaguely echoed, "A cage?"

"I clip her wings!" he yelled with an obscure laugh, and bent to take up the shears. Instead he s.n.a.t.c.hed the sickle lying nearby and spun it in the light until its cresent flamed; he stood and brandished it like an idiot Crusader. "She cannot fly to her lover. Neither by night nor day," he said, grimacing at my governess. "A duck without a mate"-it was a village jingle-"will not propagate."

The Dutchwoman glowed with fury. "Sterile guts yourself!" she burst out in her ready French. "Brain of a fowl! Pantaloon!"

"What is it?" asked my mother, dazed.

"The old man is crazy," Anneke said.

"I didn't get a word."

"Oh, he has made a portrait of his wife."

"What?"

"In the hedge," said my governess irritably, "the duck in the hedge. He did it to punish the concierge. Vraiment," she shrieked into his ear, "the resemblance is very close. It is the picture of your wife exactly!"

"I thought it was just an ordinary duck," I said.

"What would he want to do that for?" my mother wondered.

"To cure her of lying. His wife has a crooked tongue. It is a punishment for telling stories, you see," said the Dutchwoman dangerously.

My mother shrugged but did not comprehend.

"She will come to you with a bad story."

"The concierge?"

"You will hear how she lies with her dirty mouth. It is a shame, madam, it is a shame for the child."

"Oh, the child," said my mother abstractedly; she looked toward the house. The windowpanes blazed with sunset. "Listen-I think they've stopped!" It was true: a barren voicelessness roared in the garden. "Do you suppose that's the end?" my mother cried. "If it is we're off to Zurich tomorrow-you had better pack," she advised my governess. "Take her to supper and then get the suitcases ready. I'm going in to Enoch," she called, and fled across the darkened gra.s.s.

It was very quiet now. Nevertheless the rhythm of the voices still faintly beat, as though lodged over our heads in a specific piece of sky, eternally. Until the moon brightened dusk delayed, then hurtled greyly down. The concierge's husband leaned like a pillar of ash.

"Well, come," said my governess, and the look she wore that moment, and the cadenced psalmings of the deathcamps which did not leave our ears, were for me then a hieroglyph of Europe, and have since so remained.

3.

It happened that after that I never saw Anneke again.

The next morning my mother called me to her and announced the plan of my banishment. "There's no use your staying. Not any more-there's no sense in it," she gave out hoa.r.s.ely. "Enoch was perfectly right. He told me when I brought you this wasn't the place for you." Sleeplessness had skeined her eyes with complexities. "It was a terrible mistake!" she charged me, as though I were somehow guilty. "You're going to go away, that's all that's left to do."

Her voice was heavy with accusation-I could not tell whether of herself or me. Yet there was nothing I had done. "Away?" I said weakly.

"It's the only possibility. We talked it out all last night, and it's decided."

Cautiously I considered her words. "I thought I was going with you and Enoch. To Zurich, you said."

"Zurich? Certainly not! It would be the worst thing imaginable."

"Then where?"

She sighed and resumed her excavations in her bureau. "Everything's changed," she said, as though this were an explanation: she went raging through her drawers to hide from me the fever of her breathing. "I can't expect Enoch to have you in his tracks after this. It isn't logical. The responsibility is too much." She raised her head to answer me; it was weary and beleaguered, and badly-groomed for that hour. "Where? Oh, out of Europe, that's the thing. Out of Europe altogether."

She dipped her hands back into the bureau drawers as into waterbasins, and churned up a rumpled mound of shirts and socks. "Your suitcases are already downstairs. I locked them up myself this morning. Well?" she waited, turning her spoiled swollen face to me.

"Is it because I made Enoch cross?" I asked meekly.

"No, no, Enoch's not cross," she said, hardly paying attention.

"Well, I did make him cross the other day," I confessed timidly. "Anneke said I had to play in the garden, but I ran in to see what he was doing. He didn't want me there."

"No, he wouldn't want you there," she agreed.

"Then is that why I have to go away?"

"It has nothing to do with it. Now go and get some air," she admonished, "and don't ask questions beyond your years."

I went out into an absence of sunlight, only half-amazed at my predicament. The concierge was spreading newly-washed laundry on the gra.s.s to dry, flapping the loose heels of her ugly worn slippers; she laid a pattern of sleeves and trouser-legs, and set a sheet to sail, and looked up contemplatively at the unpromising sky, and then recomposed her white geometries. The bare rosebush sagged gloomily and had no shadow; someone had raked away the petals. I roamed about and poked after worms in a seeded patch with a stick, until the concierge saw me and called wrathful threats-but at that distance I could not disentangle her cries: they might have been the quibbling of a sea-gull. Red-faced she started toward me, swiveling her fleshy neck, slapping air, screaming. It was as though she were a puppeteer, with strings leading from her rapid fingers to marionettes of raindrops, large and warm, obedient to her flying arms as she pulled them down out of the sky. Midway in pursuit of me she fled again, her brow all splattered, her nose bathed and streaming; she s.n.a.t.c.hed up the wash of triangles and rectangles, shouting at me as if it were I and not she who had willed them drenched.

It rained for only a moment. A pang of sweetness quickened the air. In another part of the sky the sun made a slit and shot through like a spear. Then it rained again, but more lightly and generally, less violently. The strained droplets were blown about like powder, falling through the thinly purple beam of sun as through a slung net. Nevertheless the hedge quivered and swayed in a palsy of rain, and pendants of water hung from the duck's broad side, until it was no longer a duck, but only a cl.u.s.ter of twinkling wreaths. I roamed again and roared in the fresh fragrance, prevented by n.o.body-the concierge had vanished, her imprecations and doomed laundry with her. The color of the gra.s.s altered, grew more blue than green. There were influences: "Everything's changed" was my mother's view of it, but clearly there were influences. I felt purified and simplified, and trans.m.u.ted, like the gra.s.s, less by a force than by an illusion. It was not chemistry but atmosphere. I stood in the awesome light, exciting a puddle with my shining stick: meanwhile aware of a sort of peril; meanwhile abandoned by all plausible caretakers. My governess was nowhere-not asleep in bed, and not for a walk in the road, not anywhere. I thought I saw the flap of her smock-tail behind the gate, but it was only the concierge's towel thieved by the wind. I thought I heard her call my name from the house, but it was the rubbed moan of a twig caught in the door-hinge. I began to be afraid, because I despised her and was pledged to her and would perish without her. She had trussed up my destiny, and I sought her all around, in every wet path. It did not matter that they were sending me off, if it were in the ordinary way, leashed to the Dutchwoman's melancholy and shipped abruptly to some new spot of ground with a difficult name-I hardly cared, I was indifferent, for when we arrived it was always a disappointment: there was nothing to do there. Never mind that my mother spoke to me, at the journey's start, of high and tremendous deeds which had once shaken that very piece of soil, this very scoop of hallowed granite-by the time we set foot there, it had all been long over. And never mind, that sometimes a bemused and persuaded Enoch, sunk in scorn, told of lootings and pillage, ma.s.sacre and l.u.s.t, which the place, by its nature, gave rise to-for when we came, it was always too late: the looters, robbers, a.s.sa.s.sins and sinners were gone; I never saw anything of them or their works; and usually they had departed years ago. Tumult never touched these crannies where we lighted. So what difference to me if it were Zurich or some other part? Zurich too was old, everything had happened long ago, nothing would happen now. And for me what would there be but the ragings of my bitter governess?

But she, like the looters and the sinners, was strangely gone.

I threw away my stick and went in again to learn more of this decree.

My mother fingered my dress at once. "Oh, for pity's sake, you're all damp I"

"I can't find Anneke," I said. "I looked and looked."

"And when all your clothes were sent to the station not two minutes ago," she exclaimed. "Now what shall we do, I ask you!"

"Won't I dry? I suppose I'll dry."

"You'll dry into pneumonia. Here, take off everything, and get into bed. Not in mine. Go into your own room. Enoch is having a conference in a little while";-she pushed a swatch of hair from her forehead, distraught-"with a visitor. He'll need to be private, really private, do you hear?"

"But I haven't had anything to eat."

"At eleven o'clock?"

"Anneke always takes me out to breakfast."

"Very well, I'll have the concierge bring you something."