Trust (2 page)

"Really," I began hastily, "I don't need a ball dress. It's a very old-fashioned idea."

"Well, you have to dance in
something,
" my mother insisted.

"I don't want to dance."

"It's a very nice dress. You see how it's made? The trick is in the facing in the bosom—stiff, so it stands away. They're very clever about that in Paris. I can't understand why you don't have a bosom of your own—heredity is so mysterious," toy mother observed, showing off her high classical front. "My corset-woman over there thinks my figure is amazing for my age!" She examined me contemplatively. "She's a Baroness, you know. White Russian. They shot her whole family. She's married to the man who runs the elevator in the Eiffel Tower."

These remarks failed to astonish me.

"It's true," my mother protested. "You mean she might not be the real thing? So many of these Russian nobles aren't. This one is, though, I can tell by her manners—they're so coarse. When she's draping you she always says 'backside' straight out, never 'derrière'—an impostor wouldn't have the nerve! Do you know what her business motto is? The Baroness wrote it down for me; it's a proverb or something." My mother immediately produced a scrap of tissue paper scribbled over in a foreign hand. "Here it is: 'Ogni medaglia ha il suo rovescio.' It's very apropos."

"Is that Russian?"

"Don't be foolish—it's Italian, of course. Etymology explains everything. 'Ogni' comes from our 'ogee,' I'm perfectly sure: an ogee's an architectural term, I looked it up once, ft means a sort of curved arch. 'Ogni medaglia ha il suo rovescio,' " she repeated in her haughty literary-voice. "'A nicely arched posterior deserves a medal,' you could translate it. It's one of those down-to-earth sayings they have over there."

"But you said she's Russian."

"Yes, but then exiles are very cultivated, you see. She speaks nothing but Italian and a little bad English. She visits the Louvre every day." She hesitated. "I suppose we ought to begin making arrangements in that direction."

"Arrangements?" I said.

"It's time you saw Europe, after all."

"I've been to Europe."

"Nonsense, you were only ten. I kept
telling
everyone you were too young to appreciate travel. Oh, how I suffered! Till my last breath I shall never forget how you vomited all over the South of France," my mother finished gloriously. "You had one of those nervous stomachs, just like your father."

My mother rarely mentioned my father; she never thought of him, since she was concerned only with the present. Occasionally—perhaps every three years, but with great irregularity—she would receive a letter from my father, and then she would be reluctantly reminded of him. "Well, it's starting again," I would hear her tell Enoch. "Go ahead and do it and get it over with," Enoch would advise her, and from their tone—although nothing was ever said to me—I suspected that my father had written to ask for money. I was faintly ashamed of him, as of an invisible and somehow disreputable intruder. At the same time I had very little curiosity about him; quite early in my life my mother had dismissed him as a figure of no importance and less reality. "To be perfectly objective about it," she remarked once, "all that is terribly remote. After all, I was
with
him for less than two years over twenty years ago! You can't reasonably expect anything but the vaguest impression by now. It's hardly left a trace," she said, and looked out at me from her wedge of curls with an uncharacteristic bewilderment—"except for you." This was not the case with her first husband, who had preceded my father—not only was her impression of him still lambent, but she did not appear to have any desire to extinguish it. Of the three lawyers she retained, this man, my mother's first husband, was the one she most often consulted; now and then he would dine with us, and my mother would call him "dear William," and ask after his wife. He was married to a woman so different from herself—so clearly diligent and domestic, so innocently self-aware and eager to be courted—that it was obvious, even to my mother, what had been the trouble. William was too august and substantial a personage to be diagnosed as happy or unhappy; it was plain, however, that my mother thoroughly respected him, since in his presence she chose dull and meagre endings for stories which, in other company, she used to conclude in the liveliest manner imaginable. And William, while he was rather stiffly cordial to my mother, and very gentlemanly toward Enoch, seemed less than charmed by the dinner chatter. He would quietly talk trusts and investments, and finish by handing my mother a check in the gilt-edged envelope of his firm, a bi-monthly mission which he only very rarely allowed the mails to perform Once he brought with him to dinner his oldest boy, a correct, wan-lidded adolescent with an artificial stammer, who was so submissively attentive to the rite of passing the croutons that I was horrified lest Enoch's imprecations, muttered bearishly into his soup, be overheard. To tell the truth, William's son fascinated me. He looked remarkably like a dog of a choice and venerable breed. His dark glazed head was too small for the padding in his shoulders, but otherwise I considered him formidably handsome, even elegant. He was known to be precocious: he already had an interest in jurisprudence and he carried under his arm a copy of Holmes'
The Common Law.
This reputation for intelligence, and the trick he had of faltering in the middle of a syllable, ravished me from the first moment. William's son seemed to me the image of brilliant commitment, of a confident yet enchanting dedication to dark philosophies—in short, of all that I might have been had my mother's marriage to her first husband endured. It was not that I wanted William for my father: I wished merely to have had him, in that preconscious time, for my sire. Since we are born at random, as an afterthought, or as an enigmatic consequence in a game of Truth, and are not willed into being by our begetters, they accordingly fall under the obligation of surrendering much of themselves to us, in the manner of forfeits; hence we are burdened not merely with their bone and blood, but with their folly and their folly's disguises. Nonetheless William's son had somehow been exempted from this fraudulent heirship, this pretense that we are auspicious inheritors when we are in reality only collectors grimly fetching what is due us:—those evils (dressed as gifts) which we are compelled to exact although we do not desire them. William's son was sound, he was fortunate, he had providentially escaped his birthright. I saw him as the brother I had lost through my mother's absurdity. The more so, since we shared the same surname.

As is the custom with divorced women, in order to display her proper status my mother had retained the latter part of her marriage title against the time when she might acquire a new husband, and, with him, a new name. But after her separation from my father, she explained, she had reverted to the name she had carried as William's wife; she did not care to style herself, or me, after my father. As a result, while my mother through her third alliance had long ago become Mrs. Vand, I continued to be called after her first husband. I was generally believed to be William's child. My father was by this means virtually obliterated from our lives, since I was not permitted even to bear his name. For many years it was not revealed to me: I discovered it by chance myself one afternoon, when, rummaging in Enoch's desk for a stamp, I came upon an empty envelope, the address run over in a watered and rusted ink. Some notion about the handwriting, which was educated but wild, as though scratched on by fingers used to grosser movements, made me search after the sender. He appeared to have been reluctant to record himself plainly; not only was he absent from the face of the envelope, but from the back, and when I found him at last, it was in a hidden place, on the inside of the flap, a little furtive and blurred by the glue:

Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck
Duneacres
Town Island
New York

That this was my father I was convinced at once, although I was fleetingly put off by the starkness of his lodging, for I had imagined him as living under a congestion of tenement flats in a far and uncongenial, perhaps sinister, city. It had always been my idea that my father was some sort of artist—or perhaps a kind of sailor, a voyager or adventurer—although no one had ever told me this. I supposed him to be improvident, impoverished, and discreditable; I was given to understand, subtly and by prudent indirection, that he was a great embarrassment to us all. My school applications had always cautiously evaded mention of him, and I can recall awkward conversations when, looking away, I did not dare to deny my interlocutor's convenient assumption of William's paternity. It was a substantial relief to pretend to a relation with William, who was red-faced, jut-chinned, and white-haired, like an elderly and reliable monument toward which one has patriotic feelings. I thought of my father, on the other hand, as dun and dank and indecent and somewhat yellowish; I thought he had yellow-tarred teeth, and a porous nose, and bad eyes. At the same time it seemed perfectly plausible that such a man might be a genius. The nature of his talent my imagination did not explore, it being quite enough that I saw the man himself as moist and dirty, quartered in a moist and dirty cellar, in the manner of geniuses. It was not inconceivable that he might be an inventor, and I even believed it likely that he was a foreigner, since the only thing certain I knew of him was that he had marched with my mother in Moscow. That she, with all her gaiety, her fabrications, her enthusiasms, her adorations, could have been attracted to the repugnant wretch I had fashioned did not, to be sure, seem altogether reasonable. And yet it was not impossible: she was stupid enough to talk romantically of "indeterminate taints" and "vital sparks " and she was quick to spot, in queer people whom everyone else avoided, "un homme de génie." Still, I had no real reason for my judgment that my father was in some way singular, or at the least unorthodox. I had only my guilty instinct for his character. Sometimes, when my mother would stare at me in a certain apprehensive way—her painted eyebrows pulled together in a cosmetic frown—it would seem to me that I was wrong, or crooked, or even bizarre; and that some source of error in me, so perverse and elusive that I was not myself sensible of it, had reminded her of my father. But immediately afterward she would be laughing again. "It's not like the fairy tale, you know, where you can tell the king by the mark on his breast!" she took up mockingly. "I'm sure / don't speak of that person from one year to the next—though that's not the point." In spite of her hilarity—acrid and nervous and somehow shackled—I could not see what she insisted
was
the point. Nevertheless she did not deny the truth of my surmise. She only demanded that I explain it. "Oh, well, if you want me to believe some formula about blood will tell, that sort of thing," she accused when I could not oblige her; "you saw your father's name and you simply
knew.
Not," she finished without pleasure, "that we ever kept it from you!"

In this way, and alone, I learned who my father was. But, lest my mother feel the shame of my shame, I was discreet; I did not disclose all that I knew. There was nothing extraordinary in my recognition. Toward the end of a dark March, while an endless snow lay swarming on the sills, going by my mother's door I heard the rattle of bracelets on her furious arms; she clanked them like shields and cried out; and then, while I stopped wretchedly aware, Enoch's voice came maundering from the fastness of her room: "It's all right; come, there's nothing else to do; besides, it doesn't matter. Let's go ahead and get it over with." It was all hidden, and all familiar; it meant a letter from my father—a summer's beetle swaddled in the cold storm, prodded and found miraculously preserved, and more, atwitch with ugly life. My father's letters, infrequent as they were, always brought their own oppressive season into our house, suggestive of a too-suddenly fruitful thicket, lush, damp, growing too fast, dappled with the tremolo of a million licking hairs—deep, sick, tropical. And then my mother's eyes, which delighted her because of their extravagant decorative roundness, like roulette wheels, would shrink to hard brown nuts. We came to live with heat, barely breathing; we came to live with the foul redolence of heat, like fish rotting in a hull. Outside my mother's windows the snow continued to mass, but in the house
we sickened, enisled, hung round with my father's rough nets. "What does he want?" my mother cried out behind her door in that frozen March; "how much now?" And Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck like some indolent mariner lay on the beach of his island, nude to the waist; I saw him—my father; he lay there cruelly, like refuse; he had the patient lids of a lizard, and a yellow mouth, and he was young but half-blind; and he lay alone on his beach, in the seaweed-littered sand, among shells with their open cups waiting; and he waited. And with confidence: the day came, it would always come, when my mother could withstand the siege no longer. Then gradually my father's presence, humid and proliferous, thick and invisible, less an untutored mist than some toxic war-gas pumped by armored machines into the flatulent air, or a stubborn plague-wind slow to cool away, would recede and die. Unseen, unknown, proclaiming himself with doubtful omens, like a terrible Nile-god Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck invaded, vanished, and reappeared. Nothing would secure his eclipse but propitiation of the most direct and vulgar nature, and my mother, as enraged as any pagan by a vindictive devil, had to succumb. Money was what he wanted. Money came to him at last where he lay, and he blinked his torpid jaundiced lids and was content. My mother had her peace then, which she would celebrate at once by a journey abroad, to some cold and rain-washed country, perhaps in Scandinavia: a far and bitter place where my father had never touched. And yet the money was an act of allegiance, it appeared; she reviled the Nile-god but she rewarded him. It was not for charity, and not for pity, and not for the sake of a righteous heart: for charity, pity, and a righteous heart would not have seized her with fury or churned those wrathful cries. And afterward she had to travel, as for relief after excess. Was it love then that he sent her—my father, the man of talent—in his jagged inkings? And year after year was it love turned to money that reverberated from her hand? As I have said, my mother had no concern with the past, which she considered eccentric, because it differed from the present. Everything old struck her as grotesque, like costumes in photographs of dead aunts. She did not believe in old obligations or old loves; she was wholly without sentimentality. Every autumn I saw her give away capes and hats and purses which she had cherished effusively only a few months before. She had no regard for an article on the simple ground that, because she had loved it once, it must for that reason alone merit her warmth. She considered that everything wore out extrinsically, by virtue of her own advancement, no matter if it were as good as new. I began to see that her indifference was not for the thing itself, but rather for her former judgment of it: it was her old self she discarded.