Trust (10 page)

"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 hoarsely.

"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 butting 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 assiduously by my mother's checks, was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: and a man can be said to be a museum. Surely my father, constituting 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 fictitious. 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-lust spawns deceit even among mere watchers or bystanders, and saw my father as owning some iron god 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 passed himself off for a cheat and a crook—and broke thereby the last illusion his son had retained in the world.

Early in the morning all the next week Enoch came out on the terrace to dictate to his secretary. He put his feet up on the railing and talked into the sky while I lay nearby, listening. It sounded like a military history or plan—there was mention of trenches, border-points, atomic warheads—but since the rivers were called X and Y, the towns Redplace, Whiteplace, and Greyplace, and the generals Tweedle and Twaddle, it was impossible to know what part of the globe he was describing.

By Thursday Tweedle had advanced within three miles of Twaddle's encampment behind Whiteplace, and Twaddle was beginning to think of retreating.

On Friday, however, the young man reverted to delivery boy and carried away, one by one, four great boxes full of books. "That's as much boning up as I intend to do right now," Enoch said.

"Is it for the hearings?" I inquired. "All that reading?"

"One doesn't read for a purpose. One simply reads," he told me, affecting amusement.

"And the report?"

"There was no report."

"But you've been dictating for days."

"I never dictate. It's contrary to my temperament. I merely recommend." And he went in, smiling, to join my mother.

I did not accompany him; my mother's single wish was to avoid me. She had said she had hoped I would always live freely, and without perceiving her meaning I caught the guilty regret in her voice. Left alone on the terrace, I amused myself with guessing at her visions. I supposed, first of all, that she had schemed for me to become a cosmopolitan. "Always remember that you were born in Europe," she would remind me on the backs of picture postcards mailed at whim from the vortex of those falsely outrageous and half-secret parleys, congresses, and merely meetings that sprang like self-propagating plants in the path of her travels—"it is your lost continent," she would write, "enlarge character by recoupment of Europe" (the latter was rather like the operatic journalese of parts of
Marianna),
and occasionally I would recognize upon those rumpled three-color reproductions of aged citadels, photographed from helicopters and machine-painted with machine-vivid unreality, not simply the dry sheddings of her acquired and too-conscious myth—the romance that America cannot be "experienced" except through its sources—but also the. vaguer significations of my mother's desire.

Her aim, I conjectured, was to re-father me. She had tried it with William, and I had acquiesced, impressed with William's substantiality. Her acknowledgment of her first husband's practical authority was the nearest my mother had ever brought me to any kind of religion, but she was not altogether
mistaken in it, for William, with his sober inherited scruples, his cautious hook of jowl, and his pious distaste for all the things of this world except notes and bonds, which he somehow regarded as divine albeit negotiable instruments for good in the same way that he imagined capitalism to be the ordained church of the economic elect—this same deliberate William was one of that diminishing honor-guard of armored and ceremonial knights whose Presbyterianism is stitched into the orthodox width of their hat-bands, coat-lapels, and shoe-toes, and who preserve by its rites a creed which no longer exacts or enacts tenets. William was all my Protestantism; and if my mother, in atonement for my bad education and her own bad taste (I had once actually confused the Holy Ghost with a new kind of candy bar), had sent me to him for the sake of a patriarchal, as well as a paternal, judicature, poor William could hardly be blamed if in the name of that same Protestantism he had had to turn me away. Not William's own presumably more charitable bent, but rather the higher connivance of Christianity, prevented him from accepting that filial homage which my mother promoted in me: for she had always chosen to say "ask William," and "tell William," and "show William," while he withdrew in a sort of noble terror from the confidences and questionings of a child not his own—but his denial and his recoil were not wilful: they burgeoned out of the spirit of the integrity of the family (an abstraction which I quickly identified as a Protestant virtue), although it was clearly the integrity of his own family he meant (his preoccupation with ownership being a further example of a Calvinist probity). He believed unashamedly in the influence of private institutions. And if he was willing, as I have observed, to have Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck pass for an evil museum or palace of crime, a kind of still-alive Madame Tussaud's, then surely he would not have been reluctant to think of himself as a temple, or, at the very least, a minor but equally sacred outer chapel. Besides, William's wife hid behind kindness her plain dislike of me. Although she had no fear or envy of her husband's earlier bride (arguing logically enough that it was William, after all, who had wished for the divorce in the first instance and in the second for a woman like herself, devoted, spiritual even, who put candles on her dinner table every evening and garden-flowers in her vases every morning), it did not please her that William on his visits should encounter me so often in corridors and corners or the dark parts of stairways, where she imagined I must lurk like a process server with a summons or a creditor with a claim. Out of the most upright reservations, then, William had refused to become my custodian or my confessor. His Lares and Penates were against it; so was his whole morality; so was his wife.

After some time my mother ceased to summon William, and at last erased in me any look of claim. She gave up her hope of Puritanism with the shrewdness of a seer; she saw, in her politic way, that a temple can never supplant a museum: history has it the other way around—the friezes of the Parthenon turning up in Bloomsbury, bits of Scottish-Norman churches with ice-cream carts at the door. But no barbarian relic-gallery (even supposing there were such a thing, collected by some rich odd old Visigothic Rome-lover) has ever been replaced, within its own walls, by ecclesiastical paraphernalia, altars and elders and the rest—how then, in that singular time of Protestant rebuff, when William's costive integrities were shutting me out, how could my mother have dreamed that spires might sprout from the iron museum roof? or that Tilbeck's halberds might change into bishops' crosiers? She dreamed it mistakenly and therefore only briefly, and gave me Enoch instead. What Holiness might not undertake, said Enoch, Worldliness would.