Trust (24 page)

She exploded with a tremendous sneeze.

"There goes my last clean handkerchief," said Enoch. "Oh no, please!" as she meekly offered it to him, "do me the favor of keeping it."

"I spoiled your design," she said penitently; it was crushed in her fist.

"It doesn't matter. I can buy more."

"You won't have time. Anyhow I think there's some unopened laundry in your grip. In the tan one, I think."

"No, there are shirts in there. You mean that bundle with the blue wrapping paper? Just shirts, no handkerchiefs. I should think you'd know, you put it there."

They dallied back and forth in this manner, domestically, troubling themselves about handkerchiefs. My mother sneezed again, almost on prescription; and afterward she apologized and Enoch blessed, both in the same breath. They were all at once restored to laughing: "I really wasn't going to give it back to you. I mean I have
some
sense of hygiene." "You expected me to fold it up again and put it in my pocket," he accused. My mother rushed in, struck with an invention: "You know what? I've just had a thought—it's about Iago. I've never been able to understand his motive. I mean it's always seemed so
wanton.
But now you know what I think it was? When he picked up Desdemona's handkerchief"—she wiped her eyes and tested her nose more out of celebration than utility—"when he picked it up, well, it was just so full of
snot,
and his fingers—" Enoch snorted in disgust, but she played it out to the end. "It was such an unpleasant experience he
had
to get even. So he got Othello to do her in." "Oh, oh," my stepfather said admiringly, "she has a child's faculty. Alarming Allegra." "I wish it could be Alpine Allegra. I wish I could go to Switzerland with you." "You will another time," he promised her. The vagaries of her talk for some reason failed to repel him; he would not have endured it for a moment from his assistants.

Yet it was plain that their hilarity—half secret, half capricious—had nothing at all to do with a handkerchief. —They had forgiven one another.

"I don't see why you had to cry," my mother said, dropping down to me; she was softened. "I'm taking you home, isn't that just what you want? What in the world is there for you to cry about?"

I could think of no reason. She was just then so pleasant and jolly that I felt ashamed.

"Then what's the matter?"

I had stiffened for her scent, but somehow it did not come, although she stooped so near: either it had worn off or she had forgotten to apply it. The fading welts of a pattern of hives stippled the long curve of her chin and ran down along her throat like spilled paint. Her face was close to mine and a pretty little dent in her lip, the remnant of her better mood, encouraged my reply; and because I could not think what to tell her I pointed to the bed.

"It's all dirty."

"What? What's all dirty?"

"The mattress."

"Oh, my God," she sighed, but she went to look down at it. "There's blood on it." She was examining the stains with revulsion; she had turned severe. "Enoch, come and see."

He leisurely crossed to her. He was pretending it was a joke—the same joke she had made up for him. "If it's Desdemona's bed—"

"No, look. Really there's blood."

He laughed outright, as though she were still recounting witticisms. "What do you expect, in Europe?—Is it fresh?"

"Fresh? Of course not, it's old, it's all dried up."

"Then there's no point in contemplating it. Stale murders don't interest me."

"Oh, if it were only as decent as a murder—more likely it's shaving blood."

"Or virgin's blood."

"Ah, don't," she objected, "what a way to talk, she's only ten"—snapping up a mouthful of air: it was difficult for her to simulate shock. "I don't care what it is, they don't have the simplest idea of cleanliness. They have no standards. It doesn't matter to them
what
they let you sleep on." She scratched a fingernail across one of the black spots, and jumped away with a little cry as though she had struck a spark. "Ugh, the slime of it. Something's wet."

She had come upon my tears.

"Rain," said Enoch promptly. "All the windows are stuck open. I don't doubt it's rained in on this bed the whole summer."

"You blame everything on the rain."

"Only wetness," he teased, "is that so bad? I like to contend with facts."

"And don't I?" asked my mother, smarting at this, "I always think of facts. I give a lot of thought to facts."

"If you did you wouldn't have brought her here in the first place."

"But I'm taking her back. It's not as though I weren't taking her back."

They began to bicker over me, but without intensity. I left them and went to the toilet and came back and found them sitting on the bed, separated by the glistering stains, looking at one another in a silence so piteous that I briefly mistook it for fastidiousness. But then I saw that my mother's hand lay directly in the golden urinous outline of a tear-furred stomach-sac. "We're going now," she told me, scowling. "You had better say goodbye to Enoch."

"Goodbye."

He put his forefinger below my chin and raised my face; it was a parody of what he had done with my mother. The arc of his wrist, lifting, was ironically exact: he required me to understand that his intention was sardonic—that I must not expect anything from him, that he was incapable of any gesture not a husband's, that not in the slightest would he crook a knuckle to fatherhood. He had a wife, no more; and deliberately affecting an archaism—a trick of his when he wished to make plain, by indirection, his aloofness—he patted his chest after a cigarette and sedately uttered "Farewell."

My mother was altogether fooled. "How pretty that was," she said as we sped down the hill in the car; we were squeezed all three in the front seat. Behind us, riding the floor, a pile of boxes rose to the middle of the windows, bristling with hairy rope: it was as though my stepfather had feared some sorcerous violence lay lurking in his ledgers, ready, if he did not noose them, to leap out and away. "How pretty to say farewell! There," my mother told me, "that means he wishes you luck."

He deposited us on the boulevard, in front of a canopied restaurant I had sometimes passed while walking with my governess. But it was not the Palatin, although, while my mother zealously cut into her steak and I gnawed lamb chop bones, a piano-player sidled brown machinist's fingers languidly across the surface of a shining claw-footed instrument. He was dressed as an Arab in a long striped skirt, but he had the pressed nose and extraordinarily opened nostrils of a Negro, and somnolent pale eyes. "P'teechka, maya p'teechka," he sang in what my mother readily observed (on the strength of having once been in-Moscow, which, for the effect, she just then called Moskvá), was a seriously bad American accent. He performed thinly, in an impure, very high woman's voice, and when he finished a group of travelers not far from us put down their knives and forks and applauded. My mother went on eating—"I don't like countertenors," she muttered at her potato, "they're too eery," but I supposed she was thinking still of the piano-player at the Palatin: she looked remarkably cross. Hie seeming Arab, without stopping to acknowledge his audience, began another song, again in his inscrutable Russian: "Volga, Volga, mat rodnaya," he piped, "Volga, russki reka," but the travelers were dissatisfied. "P'teechka, p'teechka!" they yelled, giggling (the men behind their napkins, the women openly across their dinners), but he did not blink at them and would not play it again. A man in a white waistcoat, short and brisk, flew across the floor, in and out of the tables, with his toes pointed out and his full buttocks vaguely jellying, to whisper in the pianist's ear; after which he struck a petulant chord and undertook to execute, with more vigor in his angry mouth (his lips drawn flat became purple petals) than in his hands, the "Rhapsody in Blue." The travelers at once turned reverent, chewing with the solemnity of superannuated conductors: every bite a baton. But my mother said without patience, "You're finished, aren't you?"—although I had barely started my pudding.

We lay that night on fresh sheets, which the concierge angrily spread. "I could easily have given both these rooms out," she complained, her little nose wriggling like a caterpillar, in one place, without getting anywhere, "to two very nice honeymoon pairs, a double wedding only last week, on their way home from a visit to the capital. Such charming children, such good friends! They would not be separated, they asked for two rooms side by side, they had to be next door to one another, as at the nuptial moment!
Bien entendu,
I mean the priestly nuptial moment, nothing more, I don't poke into people's bedroom affairs. But then Madame Vand insists she will stay another night in this very room, no matter that I've already prepared it for newcomers, and gone to the trouble of laundering every scrap of linen, not excepting the dresser-scarf, which, I assure you, was abused like a desk-blotter in a post office, but I don't say a word, I let it all go without a word, I'm famous for my good nature, although I assure you there's not a landlady in this vicinity who wouldn't charge for it, that hawk Berthe especially; and on top of that didn't I give her the privilege of conducting a conference without extra charge, and haven't I myself seen to every courtesy that in those so-called marble palaces she is used to in Paris they are too cold-hearted to think of? Well, thanks to her I've lost not two but four for tonight, and it's well known that new lyweds tip like kings—it's the wives' influence in my opinion, it has to do with their easing themselves after twenty years of continence: still, I've lost a room, they couldn't be satisfied, both chambers had to be free, you don't imagine I would give two couples one room? I keep up standards here, after all I keep up my own moral feelings, I didn't dare to suggest it.
Cependant,
they looked capable of it, those four, they might have made a riot, they smelled a little bit of something stronger than water. Still your mother might have told me earlier she was staying, at least before I took off the sheets. I suppose they went across to Berthe, in fact I know it, didn't my spying old man tell me so? I don't doubt she'll accommodate them, but don't worry, she's not a competition, she's always empty, may the Lord bless her vermin. To tell the truth she grows her cockroaches as big as dogs and they eat her out of customers and kitchen. Nevertheless won't she rake the francs out of those poor foolish honeymooners!—much good may it do them to be bitten in the act of love, that's a consoling thought. Not that the little wives looked without experience, I don't mean on£ week's worth, and neither one an hour older than seventeen. And rings bigger than their heads: the rich pamper their sons nowadays to let them give like that. What do you think, if a bunch of this sort ever dared to lodge in
my
house I assure you I wouldn't fail in my duty to stand in the passage the whole night, if necessary I would give up my dear rest of which I never get enough, if only to make certain the bashful brides didn't skip from one husband to another! Berthe may not, but in this house I have my moral feelings to keep up. And why else would it have to be two rooms side by side if it weren't for the purpose of sampling one another's goods—you think I don't know what these sentimental friendships are? It's not for nothing that I sleep with one eye open!—Here!
J'ai tant de travail à faire!
Tell Madame Vand I don't spread counterpanes this late in the day," she departed in a fury of self-satisfaction, "not when I know there's no appreciation for everything I have done for her, and I assure you I don't mind the sort of appreciation that feels the same as air when you try to get it in your hand!"

"What? What did she say?" demanded my mother, coming into the room a second afterward. She had gone downstairs to the parlor to telephone for a taxi to take us to the train the following morning. "I suspect it's a racket," she declared, not caring for my reply, which I soon abandoned, "they want two hundred francs more to come up the hill! I called four drivers, and every one of the four talked about broken cobblestones and insisted he's afraid of blow-outs—well, it's not logical all
four
should have the same story, unless the old bat gets to keep half of it. I'd swear she does. She probably sent that deaf old man out with a pickaxe to ruin the road in the first place, if I know her type. They prey on genteel people, you know, but I won't have it. I walked
up
that hill and I'd just as soon walk down it as get taken advantage of because I'm a genteel American." "Genteel" was her sneering substitution for "rich," left over half-consciously from her proletarian period. But, not so secretly, she really did think of herself as possessing instinctively distinguishing airs. She did not fail to exhibit them now. "Well, answer me! I asked you a question at least three minutes ago. What was the concierge saying to you behind my back?"

"She still wants some money, I guess," I doubtfully summed up, for this time the woman had not spoken directly of a tip.

"Oh, is that all!" my mother breathed out, but hesitated, and would not permit herself relief. "She didn't speak of this afternoon? Did she say anything about the man who was here?"

I reflected. "I think something about its not costing you anything to see him."

"Oh, just because she let us use the room, the pig. If she knew how much it really cost she'd probably make a deal to get half of it," she mumbled to herself, and sniffed for comfort into Enoch's handkerchief. "All right, I'll give her a few francs then. She didn't interfere, I suppose that's something to be grateful for with such a snooper." Thoughtfully she twisted the handkerchief like a bracelet around her forearm. "I wish Enoch were here to tell me how much. He always knows just what to do in these situations, I mean when it's a choice between practicality and spite. He
senses
European people, you know. It's something that's inborn, it's part of having a political mentality," she said; clearly she was not addressing me, or even herself, but rather some imaginary adversary before whom she saw herself as her husband's advocate: perhaps the "people from Washington" whom he had gone to meet in Zürich. "Born diplomats shouldn't be wasted in obscurity," she concluded, and ordered me to bed sighing.