Trust (12 page)

"But I'm not Jewish," I protested. "And I'm not afraid of being thirsty, Anneke; I hate milk anyhow since it made me sick."

"Milk! You'll beg for water the way you begged for fake Coca-Cola on the boulevard today. Or else," she went on menacingly, "you will be shot before the Wailing Wall by a firing-squad from Arabia. Why not, since your father is Jewish?"

"Enoch isn't my father!" I cried, exuberant with relief. "He hasn't even been married to my mother very long—that makes him only my stepfather, you see, Anneke?"

The Dutchwoman chortled scornfully. "Did you think I'm so stupid not to understand that? But still you do not kno-who your real father is. What makes you sure
he
isn't a Jew? Do you think they will spare you when they find out that? No, I warn you, confide to your mother how you rubbed Jean François' contagion and off you go to Palestine."

Thereafter I could be relied on absolutely.

"She's loyal to you," my mother stated firmly, in frequent recognition of my governess' success with me. "The child is devoted, although she seems so cold. But she's cold even to me, without showing half so much loyalty, so what am I to expect? If not for that, I should have dismissed you long ago. Ill be frank with you, I can't bear a surly temperament. Of course you're not paid to like me, I don't say that. But at least you ought to conceal your bigotry."

"Bigotry?" the Dutchwoman sneered innocently. "I do not know that word."

"Don't you? It comes of being so conceited. It's a good thing you didn't finish at that medical school. You would have made a very bad doctor. You would have cared more for your own prestige than for anything," my mother noted with the acuteness of complacency.

"I had already chosen my field," the Dutchwoman said abruptly. "It was chemical research—I should not have liked to practise. But then haven't I told you how the German soldiers were billeted in our laboratories? They closed the school, and it did not matter what I liked." She shrugged and eyed my mother's pocketbook. "When is madam coming back?"

"Not for a week at least. It depends on the size of the job my husband finds up there. We're going to Normandy for some sort of ceremony afterward. It's to commemorate the invasion. You know it will all be as boring as the grave, full of speeches in atrocious English by foreign generals, but
c'est la guerre,
it can't be helped."

"The war has made many new positions," the Dutchwoman remarked quietly.

"You mean in relief work? Enoch is not in relief work. Unless you count burial as relief. I suppose it is, for the dead."

"No, I was thinking of my own position," said the Dutchwoman, looking first at me and then again at the pocketbook.

"My husband regards his corpses as displaced persons. He's very sympathetic toward them. His aim, you know, is to have the murderer lie down with the murdered. It's a kind of prophetic view. But in almost every case it can't be done. All the murderers are still alive, it seems."

"Mr. Vand is full of sayings," the Dutchwoman said slyly.

"He's a clever man," my mother agreed. "I just wish he'd exert himself a little with the child. I brought her out here expressly for that, but he won't take the trouble."

"Perhaps he is too busy," said the Dutchwoman accommodatingly.

"He holds a very high post," my mother persisted. "He is devoted to his work."

"Yes," the Dutchwoman affirmed in a very soft voice, smiling fixedly, "grave-digging nowadays leaves time for nothing else."

"That doesn't sit right with me, Anneke, you are too arrogant," my mother warned.

"But it is all meant in good faith, madam. The Americans have bureaucratized even grave-digging. It will be done much faster by the Americans. Your husband will see to it."

"My husband has great administrative capacity," my mother petulantly defended herself. "He has a kind of political genius. In fact," she concluded proudly, "he's often mistaken for a European on that account."

"What a shame," observed the Dutchwoman, slyer now than before, "that his present job is not political."

"There is no job today that is not political," my mother said. "It's only the dead who can afford to have no politics."

"That is another of Mr. Vand's sayings, isn't it? He is so clever it is a shame really," my governess repeated, "that he has no political influence. Perhaps that is why he is thought to be a European."

My mother blazed. "He has influence enough."

"He would do nothing for my brother. My brother was deported for underground activities. He has three children and speaks seven languages. Now he is an orderly in a hospital in Amsterdam. Mr. Vand would do nothing for him."

"There are already too many interpreters."

"Last month there was a position open. I heard Mr. Vand speak of it to you. But it came to nothing."

"Perhaps your brother did not qualify."

"No," said the Dutchwoman, "he did not qualify. They would take only an American. So many of the refugees are Polish, and the American did not know Polish. In spite of it they chose him."

"You don't understand, Anneke," my mother protested. "My husband's organization is merely an arm of the Government. It isn't in his hands to make policy."

"Of course," the Dutchwoman concurred, still steadily smiling. "That is precisely what I said. He has no political importance whatever."

"You cannot belittle Enoch Vand," my mother retorted. "Perhaps you should measure his importance by the number of people he has it in his power to dismiss. I have some importance myself in that respect. Be careful, Anneke, or I'll decide to show my importance in a way you would not like."

I looked up from my shells in alarm, but my mother's speech did not appear to have frightened my governess. "Certainly," she resumed amicably, "nowadays you Americans decide everything. But the child would not like you to send me away. It would not be good for the child."

"Nevertheless," said my mother, but there was no real menace in her voice any more. She opened her pocketbook and took out a wallet. "Do you want your wages now or when I come back?"

"Now," said Anneke without hesitation.

"You had better get rid of those shells."

"Yes, madam."

"See that you obey your governess," my mother admonished me.—Outdoors the chauffeur's horn called.—"Good-bye."

I did not answer. "Goodbye," said the Dutchwoman generously, pushing me forward to be kissed.

My mother bent to me quickly; I saw her tense stretched nostrils. She steamed with toilet-water. "My husband will be Ambassador some day," she stated, and went out without rancor to her car.

The Dutchwoman was counting bills and folding them one by one into a little purse. "That will be a great jump from the burial committee. Here," she said, and threw me a five-franc piece.

"Anneke, I want to keep my shells."

She was at once serious. "I'll show you where to find more," she offered promptly, "if you promise to stay in the room by yourself tonight."

"You know I'm not supposed to be left alone," I reminded her.

"If I swear not to tell Mrs. Vand?"

She gave me another coin, light and smooth as a wafer, and we shook hands on the bargain.

In the evening she went away wearing a blue dress and a yellow band in her hair, and did not come back until morning.

"Were you afraid?"

"No," I said bravely, "but there were noises."

"When you sleep there are no noises. Tonight you must be sure to sleep."

"Are you going away again?"

"I have to spend the night with a friend. Come," she urged, "I know a new place near the sea wall where there are cartridges."

But I had a dream, and saw a thing with ochre eyes and a brass tail which ended in a dagger; monster-like it leaped through the window and rattled its metal forelock on the metal bedpost: and I screamed in my sleep and woke the concierge's husband, although he was somewhat deaf.

All the keys trembled on his great steel ring, and his teeth were ridged with gold, and his tongue churned the spittle in the forest of his lip-hairs. But I understood nothing. And so the concierge came down the corridor in her coffee-smelling robe, rubbing her glasses with the vigor of suspicion; and very slowly and loudly, as though I were the one who was deaf, she questioned me. "Où'est Madame Vand?" "Elle est partie pour le nord," I said in the French I had learned from the children on the beach. "Et ta soeur?" "Je n'ai pas de soeur." "Ah! Une gouvernante!" "Oui," I replied. "Où est-ce qu'elle est?" "Je ne sais pas." "Est-ce que ta gouvernante est sortie de la maison?" "Oui." At this information the concierge assessed her husband's considerable mustache with a look of disgust. "Ah, nous y violà!" she shrieked. "Quand estxe qu'elle va venir?" "Je ne sais pas," I said again; "la nuit passée elle est venue à...à six heures du matin." "C'est ca!" mumbled the husband, "pas de chance," as though it were all up to his wife, and while the key-ring dangled and jangled from the crook of his knuckle they went on conferring sibilantly. Finally the concierge prodded my pillow with her fat squat fingers; it was the motion of a judge with his gavel. "Qu'est-ce que ton père fait?" she demanded with a terrifying solemnity; and because I did not know the word for stepfather, I answered as though Enoch were really what she thought him: "Mon père est fonctionnaire," I said in the phrase I had often heard Anneke use on the boulevard. "Américain," the concierge conceded in triumph, and waggled the tassel of her belt at her husband: "Le grand malheur! Alors, de quoi te plains-tu?" And I saw from the swagger of their departing backs that they were satisfied: Monsieur Vand was good for the rent-money; an abandoned child had not been left on their hands after all.

The Dutchwoman returned with the daylight; I had not slept the whole night. She went to the window and stood veiled by the early glimmer, pulling at the ribbon which had raveled in her hair; and while she leaned, her elbows on the sill and her fingers working invisible as submarines in the short tough snarls, it seemed she listened, as for footsteps; but only the faint knocking of a chain, and then the rocking of a quick bicycle on cobblestones came up to us from the street. I lay amazed: there were long creases in her dress, and long creases in her cheek carved by the wrinkles of some alien bedsheet: the side of her face was grooved like the belly of a beach against which the tide has repeatedly shouldered, and the red dawn lit into bright shallow scars the fluted skin. She was, for the moment, qualified by some private act or notion—an ugliness new in the world had mounted her and reigned in the ruts in her firth and in the swift sly receding clangor of the bicycle and in the secret morning.

She began to hum, rolling down her stockings.—"Anneke?" I ventured.

"Are you awake?" She looked over crossly. "Go back to sleep. It's too early."

"The concierge was here, Anneke."

"What?"

"The concierge—"

"In the middle of the night? What did you tell her?"

"I said you would come back in the morning."

"Now you have done it! Listen, if your mother should find out—"

"Oh, I won't tell her, I promise!"

"The concierge will tell her. Now I am finished."

"Ah, no, Anneke," I moaned under her fierce palms loosened from their lair; they hung against my face, broad and retributive and racy with an oiled nighttime odor and the distinguishable smells, like fog and ash, of her hair; and in the warm pale hearts, sentencing and consigning me, of the palms of her hands I seemed to see those deserts of Palestine, warm and pale, hot and white, laden with drifted sand like salt.

In the afternoon, although the sun poured honey, we did not go down to the sea. It was my penalty. The Dutchwoman took up my box of shells and flung it into an iron barrel, filled half with kitchen refuse and half with rain-water, that loomed in the yard behind the concierge's rooms, busy with flies; innumerable foul splashes of rust leaped up and scattered their thousand wings into the dread colonial airs ("irretrievable, irretrievable," roared the gypped black carousing flies)—"If you had cherished each one like the separate gems of a treasure I should do the same," she announced with the bitter strength of justice: "I do only what your mother wishes." And now everything must be explained to the concierge (how mild my punishment compared to that!), who was snooper, intruder, prevaricator, twister, telltale—everything must be set out straight. "The foolish child," the Dutchwoman took up, "she had a bad dream. What a pity, the very hour I was called away."

The concierge made a noncommittal sound against her upper palate. From the porch of the house the far waves flickered.

"On such short notice it was impossible to get a nurse ... the doctor had to ask me for the night—"

"Exactly what is the matter with your friend?" inquired the concierge with dry civility.

"A serious disease, poor thing."

"
Quel dommage!
" The concierge neatly bit off a hangnail. "Will she live?"

"With God's help," the Dutchwoman said piously.

"Let us pray the disease is not of a contagious nature," remarked the concierge, outdoing my governess in solicitous religiosity by crossing herself briefly; but her voice seemed oddly cool.

I thought I would placate them both by a show of concern equal to their own. "Anneke," I gave out penitently, "does your friend have the ringworm?"—remembering the torments of poor Jean François.

"No, it is something else."

"Does her head itch?" I pursued nevertheless.

The concierge howled. "
Voilà!
" She slapped her shinbone as though in the presence of a stupendous joke. "You have the right idea, but the wrong end," she went on boisterously cackling, and took her hilarity into the house.

"Sssstupid alleycat!" hissed the Dutchwoman after her. "Rotting eye of a fisssh!" And when she turned to glare at me, her mouth was wild and wishful as though it had tasted quarry.

Some days afterward Enoch and two of his assistants arrived quietly in a mild brown car. "Your mother stopped in Paris on the way down," he told me. "Her car's smashed up—she had an accident. The chauffeur was injured, and she's gone to see about the insurance."