Trust (23 page)

The tears fell. One by one they pounced upon my dress. Clearly I was unbewitched by woe, and even strangeness could not move me; yet they came falling, round dark blots teasing the blue cross-stitch along my hem. My dress felt cold and smelled of an unclean, unprivate moisture, oddly like the concierge's breath. The tears left frayed circlets in my lap: wreath after wreath sprang down, and anticipating my mother's orderly inspection I turned aside to save my skirt and watched while the naked mattress drank up the stains. All around the mattress-buttons those timeless marks gleamed in a frieze; and meanwhile new arteries seeped out of old organs, luminous anatomies proliferated, cleverly the map adjusted its topography. Under my tears the essential stains swelled—I continued to suppose they had been grooved in that place by so many accumulations of urine, so many cardinal smears of blood, so many night-thirsts for water, so many bloated spillings of wine, of those so many sleeping travelers: belonging to travelers, they were the essential blotches, blights, and streams of humanity: the wanderer does not carry what is superfluous, what passes for luxury at home shows for spurious in an inn. —This last maxim belonged, of course, to Enoch, chiding my mother for her elaborate packing of a dozen pairs of shoes. Their door opened, they came out talking in ordinary voices. "Well, I can't go down to a ship's dinner
barefoot,
" my mother was protesting without a sign of her ordeal; her tone was usual, she was not overtly chastened. Enoch had forced her to recover. "Here, give me that key," he said imperiously, and then, "control yourself, Allegra, don't act like a fool." The key's big teeth clamored furiously this way and that, and took hold with a ringing bite. At the same moment up from the garden came another jangling, as irregular as though someone danced in a cap of bells; it was irresistibly familiar, a roily clacketing sound, like the clinking and rolling of a giant coin over the cobblestones, and I ran to the window to see what Anneke had looked out upon in the early morning light and beheld, while behind me the lock obeyed and the two of them, Enoch and my mother, stopped short of the threshold like conspirators—beheld nothing. Nothing, nothing, only the grassy place below the hedge where the blue bicycle had leaned. It was gone. The scar of a wheel lay pressed in the ground. I listened and wondered at that jubilant rattling—was it the chain swinging like a now-and-then carillon, was it the tongue of the book-strap sweeping a zither of spokes?—It lasted for a space and mingled with the rain, until it was impossible to know whether I pursued the distant spin of the bicycle or a near‹ Splash on the sill.

"I can see you had the sense to put your clothes on," my mother began; she had stepped into the room as through an invisible noxious element thicker than air. "Well, look, don't hang out the window with the rain slapping at you that way! You'll only get wet all over again." She took the key from Enoch and tossed it on the dresser—it landed with an angry bounce—and stood for an instant looking back to see if he would follow. But he had no intention of coming after, and only arranged his shoulders against the doorjamb with a movement not so much of impatience as of simple weariness. "You and I are going out to dinner. Enoch's got to start out right away—I told you he has a very important conference with some Government people"—she had not told me; on the contrary this was her usual way of imparting to me my stepfather's business: by hinting that it was no use going into what I already knew—"people from Washington, and he's dead tired and has to drive all the way to Zürich by himself! It's not going to make a very good impression," she turned to him, "coming in that way without a chauffeur. They won't think you're anybody. No one's ever going to know how valuable you are as long as you go on dealing with, with—"

But she did not wish to say the word, and winced when Enoch offered her one of his perplexing and infrequent little grins. "A silent client is less of a handicap Sometimes than a talking one. Ask William," he said slyly.

"Ah, you're gruesome!"

He quietly rubbed his back on a protruding hinge. "You've never complained of that before."

"After today I'll complain of everything. It was horrible, horrible."

"It was no more," he reminded her, "than what you expected."

"I didn't expect he'd
look
like that!" she burst out.

"He looked harmless enough."

"Harmless, yes. Like a python. —I don't care if it
is
a Freudian image," she yelled.

"Well, don't abuse
me
for it," he said mildly. His face was all at once full of ironic compassionate affection. "He was perfectly all right. He did what he came to do and he went away. —Oh, he drew it out, I admit, just for the pleasure of the thing, but the point is it's done; there's no use thinking about it any more."

"But the way he looked—"

"As ordinary as possible. I noticed nothing in particular."

"There
wasn't
anything in particular. That's just what I mean. He looks the same, just the same." She clasped her hands in quick anxious awe. "He looks like a boy."

"A boy. I suppose you're right."

"But it's ten years at least. And the war!"

"The war didn't bother him. He told you that plainly. For some people," Enoch said, "war is a fountain to drink from."

"The Fountain of Youth," she answered wryly.

"Call it that, if you want."

"There isn't any other sort of fountain that matters."

He said tiredly, "I sometimes forget how sophisticated you can be, Allegra."

But she did not catch his satire. "Sophisticated. That means old. When people start calling you sophisticated there's nothing left but death and decay."

"For a decaying woman you have a great deal of ambition," he observed.

"Well, why not? I don't see why you can't get promoted into a nice clean job."

"I
have
a nice clean job."

This was beneath her scorn. "I mean something higher up. All you do is—I don't know, coordinate the sectors. I mean something diplomatic. You won't get anywhere just supervising channels."

"Bravo." Once again his smile flickered. "You've mastered a foreign tongue."

"You should make them give you something dignified."

"There's nothing more dignified than death," he said, smiling still.

"No, I'm serious. You should make them give you what Pettigrew does," she insisted.

"Pettigrew's a Democrat."

"Then you be one too!" said my mother, trotting out her funny clown's voice in order to toy with the inconceivable. The idea of anyone's becoming a Democrat, even for political advantage, always convulsed her; except for the time she had been a Communist, my mother was a hereditary Republican.

She considered Enoch with a swift intimate glance and suddenly, for the first time that day, together they fell into laughter. Brief as it was, it brought my stepfather from the doorpost and pulled them side by side. "Well," my mother said into his ear, "there must be something you can do short of that."

"Oh, I'd hang myself short of that," he obliged her.

"There's no rope short enough to be short of that," she giggled. They were enclosed, it seemed, behind a scaffolding which the disclosure of their alliance abruptly threw up around them: I peered in at them easily enough, but saw the adumbrations of a wall, and knew, as surely as though the bricks were there, that trespassing was forbidden. This was their obscure goodbye: my stepfather put a finger below my mother's chin to lift it and withdrew his touch in an instant. It was their goodbye. What came afterward would be form only. It had been settled long ago that they would not correspond. My mother's letters skipped in pursuit from place to place, accumulating new forwarding addresses with each increasingly blackened postal mark; besides, they were interminable, fattened by trivia; when at last they overtook him he found them an insufferable affliction; he called them the single Egyptian plague unimaginable even by God and begged her to send no more. They communicated by cables: this restricted my mother to the necessary.

Yet somehow I had intruded. Enoch's eye discovered me and turned indifferent; whatever he had kindled there died out at sight of me. They separated reluctantly. I felt my mother's anger; she opened her nostrils and accused me in silence. It was on my account she could not join the race to Zürich; instead she had to buy me my supper. "Enoch's going to drive us to the restaurant," she stated sourly. "He's just got time, if you don't hold us up. Though you'd better go down the hall first. —Good God, what's the matter with her hair?"

She took up my wrist like a handle and pinched me toward her.

"Where's your comb? I put a comb in there." She was nimbly investigating my pocket. "Can't you for once not lose what I give you? I told you," she threw out at Enoch—but immediately I spied the little white comb on the floor where it had fallen and snatched it up—"I told you she'd be the one to hold us up!"

Without mercy she tore through my hair.

"He's gone," I said, my head down, my mouth hidden.

"What a mess! What's made you frizz up like this? A little dampness in the air, and she turns into a sort of Zulu."

"He went away," I tried again. "Nick."

"Yes, yes, he's gone," she acknowledged.

"I saw the bicycle he came on."

"He didn't come on a bicycle!"

"Yes. he did."

"Well, suppose he did," Enoch said.

The comb hesitated.

"It was all blue, even the handlebars," I said.

"Out here everyone gets around that way," she capitulated.

"But even the handlebars," I persisted.

"That only means it's second-hand and painted over," my mother murmured, stifling what might have been wonder or disgust; it was, in any case, fascination. Furiously she resumed combing and tweaked my scalp until I squealed. "You weren't supposed to be looking out the window! I told you to stay in bed. It's no concern of yours, you don't want to have anything to do with people like that. —Stand still! How do you expect me to get through the snarls?"

"The concierge took the sheets off," I said.

"Too bad, she'll just have to put new ones on for tonight. It should teach them a little cleanliness. They think dirt and thrift are the same thing. I never heard of a Paris hotel that didn't change the sheets every day! Let them learn, they're too greedy. You have to fight greed in this world," she went on authoritatively, "even if it makes you a little less comfortable. Never give in to greed. There's no telling what can come of giving in to greed."

Enoch coolly kept his gaze on my mother's lips; she had made a little tunnel of them and was blowing the uprooted tangles out of the teeth of the comb. "I thought you were going to show some sense, Allegra," he said.

"Sense! All right, I'll show some sense. Pick your head up, why are you so difficult?" she muttered at me. "You don't mean sense, you mean resignation."

"I mean keeping your mind on the highest good," he began.

"Oh, what's the use," she interrupted.

"—for the greatest number," he finished diligently.

"Philosophy!" she spat out. "As though a whole crowd were involved. As though the whole
world
were involved. You're always making things sound as if the universe depended on, oh I don't know, on every single private act."

"Maybe it does."

"I hate that sort of talk, you know I do. I always have and I always will. It doesn't
mean
anything. What's private is private and what's public is public; that's all there is to it."

"Do you know of anything more public than the universe? And yet all the private things happen inside it. In the end," he said softly, "everything private turns out to be public, if you don't take care." He pulled from his breast pocket the handkerchief my mother had folded for him earlier. It was in the shape of a triangle. With a rapid wag of its points he flashed it open and lapped corner over corner meticulously, until he had made it into a rectangle.

"Poor Enoch," said my mother, pausing to watch these maneuvers, "you have no notion of dress."

"But I have› distinct ideas of design." Amiably he restored the cloth to his pocket. "That compensates, doesn't it? It was a question," he took up finally, "of choosing the most intelligent tactics"—almost as though he were referring to his adroitness with the handkerchief.

"It was a question of getting rid of him," my mother bluntly denied. She tugged at the last strand curled at my nape and put me off at arm's length. "There, you're finished. Let me see you. You know, I think she looks a little like my great-aunt Huntingdon. That was my father's aunt on the paternal side. She had very close-set eyes, not at all like mine. It's really remarkable about genes—they have such a definite idea of where they're going, only nobody can find out where until it's too late. —She doesn't look anything like
me.
"

"No," Enoch agreed, "nothing like you."

"She looks like someone else."

"I suppose so," he said without interest.

"The chin. And the temples, diamond-shaped in that funny way, can't you tell? Even the nose. The nose very much."

He scarcely deigned to shrug. "I'm not competent to judge."

"What?"

"—Not having been acquainted with great-aunt Huntingdon," he explained, but he had no smile.

"All right, if you want to take that attitude," she said reproachfully. "You
know
whom I mean." She brooded down over me. "Maybe she'll change. Although it doesn't matter to you. You don't care anything about her."

"You expect too much, Allegra."

"No, no, you never even try. You leave it all to me."

"You expect the impossible."

"I don!t, it's not true. I just wish you wouldn't be so
detached,
that's all."

He permitted a moment to go heavily by. "I'm not the child's father," he said at length; his weak eyelid stood up suspended in the aftermath of a blink. "You seem to keep forgetting that, Allegra."

"Oh no," she said at once. "You're wrong. I never forget it." Her hand flew defensively to her bosom; she searched him out, wondering after consequences, but the expression he quite readily delivered had nothing for her. She came from him empty. It appeared he had chosen to punish her—not severely; it was only that he had deprived her of his comfort She turned her head here and there like a parakeet in a frenzy of escape, not knowing where to light: she lit on me. "Look at her—look at her eyes. She's been crying," my mother charged. "You can't leave her alone for an hour without her making
some
sort of mess. I suppose we're in luck, it could have been the stomach-thing. You can go to the ends of the earth, there's no getting away from
that.
It's genes," she pronounced, shoving the comb into the laced slit of my dress. "Oh my God, give me your handkerchief, will you?"—she snatched it out of his coat and blew her nose into it urgently—"I'm allergic to something, it must be those damn hedge-clippings, I can't stand cut greens in the rain—"