Trust (9 page)

"How much does he want?" I asked in my mother's old and grievous tone.

And Enoch: "How much does she know?" in the same voice.

"
Her,
" my mother motioned coarsely, "that one, who can know what she knows? She's like him, why hide it any more, they're alike—"

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-glass 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 knob. "The principal religious tenet," he observed, "is that one does not dare to manipulate circumstance." Meanwhile his fingers deftly stalked number after number—he had not rid himself of the habit of the combination. "'I am the Lord thy God' 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 petitioned 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 Ambassador," 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 assassination.

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 amusement, 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 passionate study, and the passion was the end. "All that money," my mother said stalely, "to pay for a useless institution! 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 snobbishly-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-classness 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 nobility, which it confuses with efficiency, so that in America the élite (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 Ambassador is not like any of these. A President must represent the Common Man, but an Ambassador 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 Ambassadors. 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 ambassadorship 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 Ambassador. 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 transmutation 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 circumstance. 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 Hellespont, 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, gods, 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 passed me where I lay in a chair on the terrace, and I saw one of the titles. 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 tassels 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. Thè 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.

"Hello?" 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."