Trust (25 page)

We slept until midnight, my mother deeply but irregularly; now and then she released an exhausted snore, so shrill that she frightened herself awake. Meanwhile I was propped watchfully on an elbow. "Look, it's clearing," I said one of these times when I saw her eyeS snap open, "maybe the sun will come out tomorrow." I was thinking how the roofs of farmhouses and the handles of wheelbarrows would throw their quick glints into the train-windows. "This isn't an hour to gape at the sky. Go to sleep, we have to get an early start, sun or no sun," die grumbled, and stumbled into her backless slippers and her hall-coat, groping for the doorknob. I heard her steps in the corridor, slapping towards the toilets, and then an interval, and then, far off, shouts, thumps, laughter, spinning nearer every moment, and the night-time slide of my mother's slippers seeming to draw it all behind her, a chariot of noise reined to her hurrying heels. The parrot-clicking voice of the concierge's husband whistled in the passage: "It will come to no good, it will come to no good, it will come to no good." "Shut up, you feckless rooster," his wife consoled, "no one else would take them, not even Berthe, that sloven, that paragon, who is so cautious she would investigate the good-conduct references of her own grandmother before selling her a pillow. Would you let them spend the night out under the moon? They won't leave any francs with the moon, believe me." "They have left them all with the bottle, you idiot. You don't imagine that just because I'm a tiny bit deaf my nose has stopped working? I tell you you are too liberal, it will come to no good." "You don't need to boast to me of the keenness of your nose, pantaloon, don't I know it already to my sorrow? Scarecrow! That banana of yours doesn't have to go far to sniff the stuff, no farther than its own end, which is often enough left to soak in alcohol overnight. I'm not easily fooled, you crackbrain, watch out whom you call idiot!" "Ha? Ha? What do you say?" "You hear when you want to well enough. Here, take the keys, let them into the corner room where the American international fonctionnaire compared techniques all afternoon with the Hollander's lover. As if he hadn't had a sample of her himself along the journey!"

And still clutching her wrapper, my mother threw herself on the bed. Her slitted eyes signalled anger. She dangled her ankles and the slippers fell off. "Thank the Lord we're getting out of here! They've actually let in a horde of drunken hooligans, two by two. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Noah in the hall, collecting in advance. This isn't a place for decent people. If you ask me I think they're running a bro—oh never mind, go to sleep!"

But the shouts and the thumps and the laughter rattled the house till morning. They called to one another all night in the wild sharp syllables of an aviary, exhausting the hours: "Irène!" "Paul!" "Thérèse!" "Guy!"—each call unaturally sibilant and gross and not unlike its neighbor. Eventually it was possible to recognize which name matched which shriek. My mother turned wretchedly in her bed; her backward-reaching arms encircled the pillow, the silhouette of her chin stabbed upward. "Ah, that pig, what a piece of spite-work, because I wouldn't tip her"—but she was listening conscientiously. Her lids beat alertly in the dark. "Paul!" "Alors, Thérèse!" "Guy! Guy! Guy! Guy!" "Irène, ça va?"—as though each screamed-at-the-ceiling name were some wondrous, drunken, wholly obscene joke. The names flew out of the big central double-bed where the four were clustered and pecked exuberantly at everyth i ng, like tethered birds—escaping so far and no farther. Sometimes only two were let loose at once: as when Paul exhorted Thérèse, and she did not answer; as when Irène stuttered "Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy" to no avail. And then all four would rise up again with a clamorous swish of wing-tips and falsetto laughing astonished chirps: "Paul!" called Thérèse; Irène!" honked Guy; and Paul hissed back "Thérèse!"; but Irène, bird-of-paradise or merely pigeon, notched the night with "Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy" a hundred times over, until I found myself wondering whether the barcarolle of all the names sung into that room, Enoch's ledgered names and these, and the names of those wanderers sans identity or talisman who left behind their tracings of blood and waste and wine, and the names of my governess and the private visitor and the boy with the ringwormed scalp and the Negro in his Oriental skirts, and my own name and my mother's, would climb the wind at last to some great collection-place, some chief bank or storage-house of names, a nursery-bursary spot designed to nurture and preserve all the names of the world, the living and the dead together: so that immortality might consist merely in one's name having been uttered even a single time, by anyone at all. It would not matter if a king addressed you, or a garbage-man. Up, up your name would flutter, to be gathered in and pinned to the roster of all who had ever breathed; up, up it would fly, an assurance of one's doubtful existence. (Hadn't I heard my stepfather protest "I am called Enoch, therefore I am," on those stubborn days when my mother scolded him for "blanking out," as she put it, because he would not hear her shout him awake—"Get up, Enoch; Enoch;
Enoch!
"—and because he willed his return into the self-extinguishing nirvanic deeps of his morning sleep? For there is no proof of being, outside of one's own mind, Enoch claimed—housed by then—except for the solidly indisputable fact that one's friends call one by name. How can you be said to exist if you have no name? Who could prove a fly was there, if he could not call it a fly?)

The sky began to whiten. One by one the cries and hoots next door died out, the squawks dropped down, the names came in to roost.

Paul, Guy, Thérèse, Irène. They slept.

I said: "Are you awake?"

"No," said my mother.

"I was wondering—"

"Don't wonder, it's bad for your digestion, you'll start throwing up. Am I awake! What else could I be?"

"I was wondering if there's a God."

"Oh my God," she groaned with unexpected relevance, "not that again. I thought Enoch settled all that with you."

"But is there?"

"
I
don't know, how should I know?"

"But if there
is
a God, is it the same God for everywhere? I mean, the same in America as here?"

"Well, I don't see why not," she evaded me.

"All the same, I wish there were a different one for America."

"How could that possibly matter to
you?
" she argued, yawning enormously, her shoulders straining and her arms thrust stiffly out. "You're getting everything that's good for you anyhow, here, there, anywhere." She slumped down into her pillow and watched her feet change color in the awakening light. "Besides," she gave out—it was an educative afterthought—"there's only supposed to be one God. It's the whole idea of religion. They call it monotheism," she encouraged, vaguely stretching her knees; "I've just
got
to doze off for a minute"—rewarding herself: she had, with this piece of theology, done her duty by me.

After which she did not move until half-past eleven.

In the middle of the morning a prolonged hiss, misty with regret, crept up from a far part of the world, and swept away again: it was the ten o'clock train silkenly departing, repining, swishing its complicated petticoats over a shimmer of track.

I escaped into the garden. The air tasted green and ready. Amulets of rain lay scattered in the grass—bright puddles and patches of glistening mud drying with a delicacy in the fresh warmth. The sun burned like a ship; it burned in the sides of the iron barrel, pursued by the growls of a confraternity of flies; it burned in the bush. A long feather-fan of light waggled in the hedge-duck's bill.

In the groove where the blue bicycle had leaned I found a limp little book, the pages all soaked and fused. It was so small, no wider than three inches, that I supposed it had slipped out of the string that had bound it with the others to the fender. Bits of wrapping paper still clung to it, but the violet dye of the covers had run off into the ground; the title was almost watered out of legibility. I labored to decipher it; this would have been difficult for me even if the letters had not been blurred, for when I had made them out at last I did not know the word I had constructed. ENCHIRIDION, it was, and underneath: OF WOODLAND FLOWERS. I tried to force the leaves apart, but they broke off in my fingers like bunches of dough. Then suddenly while I turned it over, looking for an opening, the little book seemed to melt in two; each surprised hand came away holding the exposed part of a dampened page, with half the volume stuck behind it. On the top part of each was reproduced a colored illustration of a plant, in minute and literal detail. Every hair on every petal of the two drawings shone with the artist's struggle for exactitude, and since the book had split open at its core, in spite of that outer drenching the pictures had been kept from ruin; even the print remained clear.

In my left hand I read: "False Hellebore; American White Hellebore.
Veratrum viride.
(Lily family.) The False Hellebore, a baneful but noble plant of splendid and vigorous aspect, may be seen blooming in wet woods from May to July. Its extremely poisonous thick rootstalks are used in the preparation of emetics, and its seeds can kill small creatures. The stems are stout and notably erect. Although adult beasts cleverly avoid eating its abundant foliage, young ones are sometimes fatally lured."

Above this was a drawing of some unfortunate spinach-leaves with greenish caterpillars growing out of them.

My right hand's prize was more attractive—little dangling bells of orange. The artist had not compromised with truth: the stalks stood rigid in a cardboard woodland where$$$ wind ever blew. "Jewelweed; Wild Touch-Me-Not," said the caption. "
Impatiens biflora.
Blooming season, July to October, near water. How like rare gems are these delightful flowers when dew dances in their little tender cups shaped like horns-of-plenty and culminating in short spurs the hue of a kitten's tongue!" Only momentarily did the legend give up science for rhapsody; briskly it recalled itself to botanical sobriety. "The name Touch-Me-Not almost certainly derives from the quick, spasmodic action of its ripe seed-pods which instantly erupt at a touch and spurt their seeds in every direction."

I thought this a very curious thing; it was nothing but a silly guidebook to put in one's pocket while walking in the woods, if one could, after all, find a wood to walk in; and being urban, I did not believe one could. It was so innocent I thought it sinister. It could not have been left behind, even by the wind, without some inner consistency of chance; for (according to the dogma of my stepfather) what appears to be chance is in reality the last confirmation, for the pious and the ignorant, of a superior intention. Just as—Enoch liked to say, with how much atheistic irony I do not know—when Titus' monument to the sacking of Jerusalem, that great arch made for eternity, crashed among the plunderers of Rome, nothing remained to speak glory but those raised representations of the Scroll and the Seven-armed Candelabrum; as though not chance but the Temple had ruled, even for mere sculpture, what was to survive the boot of history. And I did not suppose it extravagant to think of the private visitor as a sort of Titus who had come to arouse my mother's vengeance and to despoil her sanctuary, remembering how piteously she had beseeched her husband to shut him up, the legionless tyrannical but mild-voiced and laughing adventurer, to bring him down, while all the while he went on probing her sanctuary, a place and time forbidden and improbable to me: a bed in a room in Brighton, an alien unsung city, for all I knew as desolate as barbarian Rome, unimaginable Brighton, where snow had once grown beyond the door like a toothache-herb. Therefore I looked on that ENCHIRIDION as on the scratching upon some tablet or reliquary or arc de triomphe set up to outlast man—a trophy which, if properly scanned, might disclose the victor's ominous damning flaw, his singular lust or proclivity, his doomed miscalculation or weakness, in short the whole secret of his nature's dark rot—precisely as the Arch of Titus still reveals the fateful broken sneer of the god-emperor who believed that in diminishing the Temple he diminished the Law. But these ozymandian ideas, as I say, are not so much mine as Enoch's, who in those days used to take satisfaction in emphasizing his purported descent from Solomon the King—if only for the pleasure of teasing my mother into a fever of exasperation. And although I was influenced by him more than he or his wife guessed (it was true, for instance, that he taught me by example: the homely opposite of which I would faithfully resolve to follow), I never succeeded in copying that swiftly acrobatical turn of his intelligence which could all at once outrageously associate cabbages and kings, and could even call the symbiosis, no matter how peculiar or antipathetical, by the name of common-sense. To an ordinary mind (and the child-mind is the most ordinary of all, the least capable of convincing juxtaposition), there is a difference between a conqueror's monument and a picture-book; and if I could see a profligate general in my mother's tormentor I could not, on the other hand, descry thick theories-of-character in those two moist remnants of his appearance, those painfully decent bugless pictures so perfect that they seemed to bowdlerize nature. What I saw was, as I have said, innocence, or, at worst, whimsy—the mildest sort of domesticated caprice. It exactly matched the fact of the blue bicycle; it exactly matched the little flag at its tail; it declared nothing but merriment hindered ever so charmingly by impertinence (quite like the "Rhapsody in Blue," after all, insolently performed. It was all innocent, and at the same time all admittedly queer; all admittedly baleful. It was innocence out-of-place and therefore suspect; yet innocence all the same. My mother had awaited evil in a conviction of harm, a certainty of terror, and it had come riding in upon the wrong vehicle, wearing (undoubtedly) the wrong clothes, lull of old wrong anecdotes, gushing freshets of wrong laughter; and instead of leaving behind the correct imprint of its class—an unmistakable cloven hoof eloquently delineated in slime—it had stamped in the mud, wrong again, the comfortably innocent mark of a bicycle tire. And as if this were not wonderful enough, the protocols of Beelzebub had turned out to be nothing more pernicious than the jewelweed's habits and the hellebore's way.