Trust (59 page)

Memorandum from Connelly to Allegra:

April 17, 1938. Bank of London, Ltd., has been directed to honor checks bearing signature of A. Mealie up to the value of
£'5
each. For problems of similar degree, it will be convenient for you to make arrangements with Mr. Ian Makin at the bank. Blackburn and Tweddly, Solicitors, have been instructed with regard to this individual's emigration. Yours very truly.

Allegra to William:

May 1, 1938. This isn't a letter. Today is May Day, and even Enoch's ignoring Labor. He has to, or his arm won't heal. Still, May Day without a parade! We're going to get ourselves driven all the way up to the Cotswolds to see some May Dancers. The Green Park is full of green, it's true, but the country is the country. One ought to ogle low stone walls. This is only to say how surprised I was to hear (from little Sparrs, who got it from his mammy) that the wedding happened so fast. And so quietly. I suppose it was a great sacrifice for Sarah Jean, letting it all go with a hush, and not getting to be a bride with all the gala. I don't know why you slipped into it like that, it makes you seem so
mournful,
like a widower. Doubtless you knew what you were doing. —I was going to say something about staying on a few more months, but here's Enoch leaning on the bell, so goodbye, we're off for maypoles. But the bank sent a mysterious little message. I guess you know about it. The upshot of it is you want me to keep away till you're settled down. Just like a widower faced with an unlucky ghost! Well, if you want to correspond through the bank until you're settled down, I don't object in the least. The trouble is the bank doesn't care whether they find Nick or not. The bank's given up, and advises me to do the same. Everything's dead to a bank, you know, it doesn't matter how many ribbons are going around how many maypoles. —Enoch's in, and yelling like a madman. I
said
this wasn't a letter. No, there's not the tiniest stick or thread I want out of the Scarsdale house. It's all Sarah Jean's, with my blessings. (Is it all right for me to say that, or do I have to whisper it to the bank so the bank can whisper it to you?)

My mother's letters. If only it were possible to call them incredible! (And thus evade them.) But by their tedium they compel belief. Not that their impulse shows a want of vitality—they have, after all, the flute-note of purity: a distinction which some persons, probably including my mother herself, ostentatiously like to toss into the category of Subjective Truth. Tedious her letters undoubtedly are; but they are not
merely
tedious. Think of music—some delectable sonatina, say, small yet brave—and imagine it played in the next room. Imagine it played in the next room for five hours. Even the marvelous, too long sustained, can be charged with tedium as absolutely as, in another part of the mind, the folklorist Toynbee kills our trust with his deadly progressions of distortions, any one of which, alone, we might smile at, as upon a weed grown up in a Japanese rock-garden. Here, however, I find that I am quoting Enoch. "Not only endless quiescence, but also endless excitation, produces the torpor of tedium," he said the day I brought out the bundle of my mother's letters; "the most celestial hymn, uncelestially prolonged, will do it. Not for nothing"—sly Enoch! to achieve this last and my mother's laughter he threaded through a lacework of ornately balanced prologue—"not for nothing do we speak of the Te Deum."

I have stated that I brought out my mother's letters. This means they existed. How did they exist? William said he had torn them up. The stern historian, remembering this, will accuse me of having reconstructed them from my mother's public mode of writing (I avoid the word "style," though the innocent historian might not) in
Marianna Harlow.
And indeed such a forgery would not be difficult. The letters as they stand have many of the characteristics of her fiction—so much so that, having tested one's soul in these, it is no longer necessary to try oneself more profoundly in
Marianna.
Here, in the absence of novelistic device, are all her devices: more than one panting reader has noted how the whole of
Marianna
appears to have been conceived of as a single paragraph. And here is her adoration of dialectic, and of dialogue, and of Intellectual Matter not her own stuffed naively but diligently between rapturous sheets so as to make a mattress upon which to rest the astonished and violated ear. The metaphor of the mattress is not by chance. And the guru in it is undoubtedly what my mother would term the "philosophy parts"—though the same historian will perhaps blame me for having invented these out of the logic of history, which always personifies. Even in the dialogues of Plato (easily as theatrical as my mother's) we have representations not of humors but of the dual political history of the race. ("The majority of the beasts, if polled, would vote Rightist."—Enoch. Or again: "Lambs are born liberals.") But the mattress has a kick here, and a sag there, and is, besides, noisy with the claims of phantom voices: sometimes Enoch's, more often Nick's, now and then a solecism adapted from a foreign idiom introduced to my mother by that Hugh who, though this may not be the place to tell it, finally earned his daily nutriment abroad by dressing in Arab skirts and singing romantic Russian songs in a Georgian accent (not that Georgia where Stalin was born) and in a very fine near-soprano. The accent was partly perforce, and partly to deride—not the songs, but his audience. Sometimes he liked to tease a male auditor (whose spoon hung amazed at his lip) by declaring himself a rival for the male auditor's wife's affections, and this in a country where there were no miscegenation laws. But what Hugh really liked was the skirts: they hid him. They also revealed him. After the war he turned up where Nick turned up; they often traveled together, a pair of minstrel dominoes or dice, white imposing on black, black imposed on white. Or they split, usually by night, each addressing his own scarred piano in his own fork-flashing winey provincial cellar. Their daylight sins were not the same. Nick roamed beaches, found what he had not sought (he prided himself on never petitioning), and afterward submitted to physiologically-oriented interrogation in several languages, including Dutch, by his fellow piano-player the walnut-veneered Ph.D. If the woman was my governess, and could be had therefore only in the unfocussed depth of morning dark, while demons clanged, the questions would be Dutch, the vicarious fancy would be Dutch, Hugh in his long Arab skirts would dream himself deliciously Dutch, and then go make excuses for Nick in Nick's café to Nick's employer, in French. He would say, in French, that his friend had been kept away the night before by illness, and would be kept away tonight by the same malady; the malady was a Dutch malady, and continued until my mother cured it by sending away the carrier, poor wrathful exiled Anneke, who saw cruel Palestinian wastes in the sands of the beach where Nick came rambling in indifferent hope of discovery: and discovered my governess, dozing on a flat wedge of stone. Meanwhile far below, among the smaller wavelets with their heads dissolving into little pools of white spittle, I was catching the ringworm from Jean François. Like a pair of courting lizards, Anneke and my father (my father!) flirted on that stone and arranged their brief opportunistic future: one spoke of the nasty child she had to tend, the other of his nasty piano. And Hugh was sent to tell them at the Palatin that Nick could not play that night. Well, let this be said of Hugh: he knew all the white man's languages. Never mind mere Romance, Kelt, and Slav; he knew all the varieties of the Germanic tongues—Low, High, Middle; Scandinavian in its several guises; Flemish; even Yiddish; even Afrikaans. Afrikaans yes, Bantu no. He had the round, beautifully-turned foreskull of a Johannesburg sweeper; few American Negroes are negroid enough to have retained that lordly arc of brow. Let this also be said of Hugh: though knowing all the white man's languages, though agonized by the longing to be white, a white man he did not long to be. The white màn takes. Imperialist colonialist brute, the white man takes. Hugh wanted to be taken.

But all this is by the way. Be assured that I did not get it from William. I was musing on my mother's letters. I did not get these from William either. Yet innumerable letters glutted William's files. He had letters from architects and from contractors and from engineers of bridges. He had the young Armenian's violent letters. He had the cautiously polite but impatient letters of the fourteen other prospective curators. He had one primitive letter, in capitals, from the ferryman. He had repeated letters in a hideous pastiche of near-English from the young Armenian's parents, in which they refused the indisputably generous sums proferred for their son's life. He had a sympathetic and perhaps too graceful letter from the doctor who had escaped the acquisition of an Armenian son-in-law. He had letters from the county threatening suit. Oh, William had letters! (All lawyers do.) They were kept in a file in Connelly's charge, marked Miscellaneous. His son had read them all.

But not my mother's letters. These William did not have. These his son had never read. Why? Because they were in a cardboard ladies' stationery box, with gold stripes across the cover, secreted at the back of the third drawer of Enoch's locked desk. He gave me the key and told me where to find them and ordered me to bring them out There were the letters I have reproduced here (and not from imagination or speculation), and a few others. Each was encased in a pair of envelopes, the inner one fragile and crackly and zealously scratched over in my mother's hand, the scratches pointing furiously toward America, the outer one of a thick opulent paper and prudently directed toward an English bank. America had read them all, and America had returned them all. Strange, strange! There were, besides, the letter from William I have already given, and a dozen or so memoranda under Connelly's name. Oh, strange! I held them and weighed them and sniffed their ancient emanation, vaguely of sea (but most had gone by air), and regarded them as my mother must have regarded her mother's madder letters, never mailed, which the maids had brought down to her long ago: it was the same; I thought them intrusive; I thought them obscene; I thought them monstrous. For a short space I intensely believed them to be forgeries, or, lacking that, some incomprehensible hoax understandable only to an irrational generation, now luckily dead. I saw them creased, unfolded, re-folded, sealed and unsealed and then again sealed, here and there yellowishly gluey or dimly patched with brittle tape; but their horror for me was not that they were old. They were old; it was not age which opened out my bitter fright. It was that they were evidence; they were in effect witnesses; by their changelessness they confirmed, they spited. Worse, they showed how the devil contrives to keep his dossier empty. They existed without seeming to have existence; like all witnesses and testimonies they were not the thing itself; they were
about
the thing, and could err. Behold, the thing itself has vanished; place, time, circumstance—all vanished and vanquished. Only the witnesses and testimonies linger. They come on stage Indian-file, superannuated, redolent of rejected moonings, and wearing out-of-date garments everyone now finds as ridiculous as a costume for a slightly stilted play. That my mother, today placidly conjuring herself mistress
of the Embassy, should yearn to marry Nick, a drifter, a piano-player! Obsolete, all obsolete. It was as crude and absurd as though she §hould suddenly declare a passion for Ed McGovern. I could not swallow it: my mother as young as I, my mother in her wild old days. Her letters stank with their imposture; they denied the stick of time along which we willingly enough appear to jump, insanely, notch by notch; I despised them. No wonder the devil's dossier is always bare! There are no wedding-congratulations in it. There is no philosophy in it. What has been uttered has been forgotten. What has been written is disgusting, and no one will believe in it. This is how he maintains his flexible versions of what-was—the devil; this is why his briefcase is unburdened. Everyone helps him. What exists, or existed once, is said not to exist, or never to have existed at all. And if evidence should all at once emerge, and testimonies, and witnesses, by their own force, by their own radical and improbable nature they are discredited. My mother's letters! She, it turned out, did not remember having composed them; and when, obeying Enoch, I confronted myself and her with their unarguable quiddities, present in, of all undeniables, her own unchanged, hence undeveloped, handwriting, she professed more vigorously than before never to have written them. She claimed she very plainly did not feel that way, therefore could never have felt that way; she leaped hindward from improbability to impossibility. And I with her, daydreaming they were a fraud, like my mother's second marriage and divorce, supposedly to and then from that Nick who courted my governess on the beach of Europe and afterward bargained for my ignorance of his being. And achieved both; Anneke by night; blackmail by day. He always achieved what he was after; probability never touched him; for him, without danger, everything could exist, all things were permitted to exist. Meanwhile in a backward fancy I fixed on Connelly, the meticulous accountant: saw him standing, head large and clean, neck a clean slice of cylindrical pudding, at the harbor of New York, hailing steamers; or in the middle of some undersized Nineteen-Thirties suburban airfield, cattails innumerably waggling behind the landing strip, waving down a shimmering noisy wing. In all that distance of twenty years he seemed not smaller; rather, enormous, excessive. His great thick fingers plucked my mother's letters from the sea, from the air; I felt his dread intercepting frown. What came to William's eye William's hand tore. He tore, he tore; and tore. But Connelly, meticulous,
had never torn a paper in his life; he offered to establish a private file, a smothered file, a file open to no one at all, not even to Connelly. William murdered the proposal with a twitch: a descent of the eyelids, trifling and sudden, but to Connelly meaningful and stupefying. He hung from William's look like a spider from his tenuous chain, on which the mesh of delegated strengths rely, through which all connections merge. His employer did not quite seal upper to lower lid; only pointed his glance as near to himself as possible, hoarding what he might finger there. The solid spears of my mother's childish alphabet ripped the caves and cushions beneath his sweating knuckles. Then inexplicably he ceased to tear her letters: inexplicably he ceased to open them. He gave the envelopes, virgin, to Connelly. He spoke: "Read, review, consider, administer, reply to what requires reply. Then discard. Discard." Connelly, well-instructed, read, reviewed, considered, administered, replied to what required reply: then doubted. The bookkeeping mind does not discard indiscriminately. It discards either what is altogether irrelevant (this comes under the heading of finished business) or what is only too relevant (unfinished business of a suspicious nature). My mother's letters, with their devious tangents and tiresome discourses and irrational intrusions of scenes and slyness, escaped either category. They seemed not to count for nothing, but neither did they count for too much. Here and there, in scattered parts, they were plainly business, and carried the voice of injunction typical of clients of a certain magnitude; yet they represented, in a particular area pertinent to Connelly's employer, a business unmistakably finished. They were, in short, neither trifles nor threats—what was to be done with them? Not for the first time obedience quarreled with private judgment in Connelly's exacting universe. He forsook the Rome of William's command and made a Protestant decision: he delivered up those laden envelopes, white and terrible as wedding-sheets, padded and flaunting shame, delivered them up preserved, to William's desk, where his employer, coming one morning from his second marriage-bed, met them all in a row, like violated pillows pinched by use, or say instead like dead fattened swans, ready to be eaten. But he despite outrage could no longer tear them: Sarah Jean, who lived her piety and recommended mercy in all things, was certain one disposed best of the ungrateful past by showing it a gentle hand; she produced an apt epigram from the Epistle to the Corinthians, which coaxed a secret quiver from her husband's
larynx, and induced in her own soul (she was certain she had a soul) a firm superstition that men who marry twice are as the lost sheep who will be gathered in. But William caught himself that minute in a recurring guilt of contrast—he could neither endure it nor elude it. The new wife's shrewd Pauline maxim, succinct, all wide white glass in its clarity and charity, all touching, modest, and persuasive, soiled his mind with its perfection. It shook out in him resonances; he scarcely knew whether it was her disciplined niggardly bosom in its spare dull-silk frame that embarrassed his early eye, or some peril of longing seeping somewhere near his collar-bone, as though he had just swallowed something queer but familiar. Gladioli stood serenely in vases. Was it this, a kind of dream of order realized, that made him all unexpectedly, all astonishedly, oh criminally despair? And here nearby were Sarah Jean's books, brought from her parents' house—impeccable ancestral sermons and collections of hazy brown photographs of Sussex parsonages. There was a harmless Episcopal strain in that family, a tendency toward genuflection among some of the older aunts; Sarah Jean had not yielded to it. She established faith, then left the rest to behavior. She thrived on advice—projected, not encountered—and advised William that error could be brought to penitence only through the medium of sincere pity. He thought she mentioned Mary Magdalene; it startled him—but then she might only have been speaking of the Cambridge colleges, á propos of her current absorption in an ecclesiastical history of England. She read with now and then a pleasant obliging sigh of discovery, like Queen Victoria examining an official compliment from her Prime Minister (Disraeli, not Gladstone), and consenting to recognize it as true. William found it prudent to be attentive to her attentiveness, so precisely solicitous was it toward his views, so totally bending was it to his preference. He uneasily felt he did not always deserve the plenitude of her attention when she addressed him (meaning—he faced it vaguely—that he did not always give her his). She was grateful to be married; she was very clear about that; she did not hide it from him. Her reply to everything was simply and modestíy to hope she might be good. She way good. She was persistent in her goodness, she was above all certain in it. Her goodness was founded on an altogether modern distaste for self-deception. She explained she would try not to forget that she was a successor, a replacement, a second thought, in William"s life, if not in his present mind. She said: "We must not be afraid to name things by their names," and supposed it was hardly reasonable to expect that William could obliterate his treacherous and unhappy failure. Together, therefore, they would agree to fix on the past, to take it in and turn it round and observe and perceive and comprehend whatever unendurables it might throw up in the stir. She contended that it was they whose duty it was to swallow the past, lest the past swallow them. No one should ever blame her for not allowing William the opportunity for purgation. Freedom of the feelings was with her no mere mildly-acknowledged tenet: she believed in it actively, and was ready to listen to whatever William might wish to rid himself of, all old miserable tales of what had happened to make him stumble.