Trust (26 page)

Jewelweed and hellebore! The private visitor—in spite of everything—was fond of hunting for commonplace flowers in non-existent woods: a poacher of gardens. I thought how relieved my mother would be, and scarcely able to wait for her to waken I set the little book out to dry in the sun; then lay in placid ambush.

At noon the honeymooners arose with a clamor, and began throwing their shoes out of the window. "Thérèse!" "Paul!" "Irène!" "Guy!" they cried as the shoes came flying down; but a bit of rusty scrollwork in the railing caught the tall red heel of one of them and held it fast. "Guy!" shouted the girls; "Paul!" shouted Guy, and after a minute a furtive young man crawled out upon the ledge in a loincloth made out of a towel, with a scared face nearly as red as the shoe (which he saved), and big intricate ears that somehow seemed far more naked than the rest of him. "Paul!" they applauded as he climbed back in; and immediately the shoe, wrapped in the towel, went soaring away. In midair the bundle separated: the towel fell here, the shoe there. After the shoes they tossed out a pair of blankets; next someone's eyeglasses, which landed safely; and finally the girls' underwear. Garters and brassieres gracefully descended, ballooning, pants were briefly inhabited by the breeze of flight—but there were not enough of these to content the throwers, so they cut open a pillow and beat it on the frame of the window and sent out ten thousand eddying feathers. A white storm stirred in the sky, until little by little its center floated away, disperSed, and wandered downward to nest in the grass. A feather fluttered over the drawing of the hellebore, then settled. I blew it away. "Guy, Guy, Guy," they endlessly praised. The whole yard looked full of snow.

I called out, "Come and see," for my mother just then appeared on the porch with the concierge, arguing bitterly. Meanwhile the concierge wrung her apron, clutched at her hair, put a finger up her nose, another in her ear, wiggled a loose back tooth, and finally as a last vain resort, crossed herself. "I do not understand," she was saying over and over again, although it was in a version of French that my mother scolded: "please to proceed more slowly, I have the difficulty..." But my mother went on complaining hoarsely: she had not been allowed to sleep, she had been forced to oversleep, she had missed the ten o'clock train, the taxis would not come up the hill. "Madame Vand," the concierge began, and from the half-conciliatory, even obsequious style of her rapid peasant's hands I concluded that my mother had been intimidated into giving her a tip after all—which made her contempt so much the bolder, since she had in effect paid for the felicity of exercising it. "Madame," the concierge once more attempted, but my mother, incensed, broke into violent English: "Madam! Look here, don't you call
me
such a name!
1
know who's the Madam around here! I know what sort of a place you're running!" and to display her vehemence she almost waved her arms, but luckily at the last instant happened to remember that this was one of those disgusting practises, typical of Mediterranean peoples, which she was always deploring, since she regarded it as a habit nourished only in the blood of inferior races—and just in time she pulled her uplifted hands to her head and pinned her hat down tight, quite as if this had been her intention from the beginning.

"Come and see," I said impatiently. "Look what I've found."

"Found where," she answered, continuing to glare at the concierge, although she knew perfectly well that scarcely a word was comprehensible to her. Neither was French, however; her French was almost never comprehensible to a Frenchman; and as long as they weren't going to understand her anyhow, she had long ago decided not to be understood in the world's only truly easy language—through sheer good fortune her own. "Found what," she said carelessly, returning to the attack. "The taxis won't come up the hill, there's a racket going on. all night—and look here, when it comes to rackets I'm not
that
naive, don't tell me you're not in cahoots with every driver in town!" ("Ca-hoot, Ca-hoot," said the concierge, who was apparently eager not to miss an opportunity for adding a new word to her foreign vocubulary. Perhaps she thought it useful for tourists. "Ca-hoot," she repeated willingly.) "A brothel!" my mother was saying, "and outright, and with a child next door!"

Since she plainly meant me, I hoped I could now get her attention. "Look," I called again, "look what I found near the hedge."

"What, what, what," she acknowledged, and stepped off the porch, the concierge pursuing, all the while imploring "Ca-hoot," as though this were some singularly efficacious American term denoting great courtesy; she must have supposed from my mother's emphatic tone (had not my mother politely—albeit excitedly—addressed her as "Madame" again and again?) that it was a very important word indeed, suitably all-serving, a possible sesame to good will (it had chronologically followed the really good tip my mother had certainly produced—the poor woman could not count in francs, and always overestimated—far larger than the concierge had dreamed). "In cahoots with each and every one of them," my mother was still insisting, dipping an unsuspecting foot into a carpet of feathers. The word sounded unusually businesslike, firm, yet not unfriendly. "Ca-hoots," the concierge mouthed it, adding a highly audible "s" to give the syllables a native sophistication; it seemed she intended to memorize them then and there. But "Oooowah!" she suddenly wound up; and "Ooooh!" my mother joined her; for a moment they spoke an identical language of animal surprise. Overhead a second and a third pillow were being emptied—it snowed convulsively in their faces. The two of them stood howling. "Ah, the little beasts!" screamed the concierge. "
C'est se moquer du monde!
I'll get them! Nothing is surprising nowadays! I'll show them! I'm not a moralist, even Our Blessed Lord forgave the woman ... Little beasts! No wonder Berthe wouldn't have them, this is her revenge on me—stop! Stop! You are destroying property, what do you think,
par le temps qui court rien n'est surprenant!
Murder! Murder!" A cloud of feathers—this was the fourth pillow—drowned her arms, whitened her hair, coated her lips. She spat and caught a feather on her tongue and spat again, while the honeymooners deliriously celebrated their hero—"Guy! Guy! Guy!" "Guy is it! I'll show you Guy!" yelled the concierge. She stooped quickly‹ to grab a shoe and aimed straight for the open window; my mother picked up another and did the same. The girls, retreating, squealed and swelled with the pleasure of warfare, but the young men hung over the ledge, feigning gallantry with a diffidence that seemed to plead for fig-leaves, and posed like sheepish shortstops, elbows out against the missiles; and the shoes sailed past their heads. "
That's
not the way," said my mother, who sometimes liked to boast of how good she had been at volleyball (under the auspices of Miss Jewett's Classes,
circa
1928, in the basement gymnasium of Saints-Cecilia-and-Elisheva-of-Haworth's); she reached for another shoe, a man's big brogan, but it only struck the side of the house and chipped a shingle and came swiftly down again. "Bad shot," my mother called out with a teamcaptain's groan of dismay. "Now they will show themselves naked, will they?" screamed the concierge. "It does not matter that I slave night and day for the sake of honor and a good name, they will come and stand on the roofs with all the machinery of their sin open for the world! In, go in, hide yourselves! Like cats on a fence! Since the war the fathers don't whip the sons, and the sins of the fathers set the teeth of the sons on edge—believe me, if they had
me
in the Government—cats, go back in, what do you imagine God made trousers for?—shame is worse than poverty, and better than gold is a golden reputation, don't think I don't know the words of our Holy Saints," she went on wildly, running back and forth in the mud and punching air. In response Paul and Guy merely grew braver and whistled through their teeth to demonstrate exactly how divine doctrine had set them on edge, and behind them Thérèse and Irène tinkled and sneered. "Now watch
this,
" my mother promised, weighing in her hand the red pump with the long sharp heel: shrewdly and expertly she balanced it behind her ear and heaved it. The concierge watched its trajectory with a loosened jaw, spewing alarm; the boys ducked, the girls shrieked, there was a distant indoors crash. "The window!" said my mother looking up; but the window was intact. "Oh oh! Then it's the mirror!" she gave out. She was enjoying it all. "The mirror over the dresser. There's seven years bad luck for you!
Sept ans—
" she tried it, but abandoned it in a suffocation of laughter. The concierge fled in the direction of the destroyers of property, encountering her husband on the way, his mouth full of complaints and bread. Half a narrow loaf stuck up from his pocket. "Eat the profits, you!" she stormed. "Go upstairs and throw them out! But for you I would never have consented to admit them, rooster! Grandson of an ass! Wastrel! Old monkey, see that they scat before I send you with them!"

They vanished, the two of them, angrily breaking the long loaf between them and brandishing the pieces at one another like a pair of caveman's clubs, while my mother in her toga of feathers crossed the white-strewn grass. "Here, help me get this stuff off," she commanded cheerfully—"how it
sticks!
" With rounded cheeks like a caricature of Aeolus she peered down her bosom and blew and blew. The feathers clung to her as poignantly as blossoms; one by one I flicked them away. "Don't pick at me," she objected, "just brush me off, can't you? If Enoch were here I bet he'd die laughing—my God, look how I'm shedding, what a nuisance! But I don't mind, it was worth it, I feel absolutely avenged." She lowered her head so I could sweep the feathers from her nape. Her shoulders and neck were pink with exhilaration. "The fact is she deserves it all, that woman—I wish I'd smashed the window too. What a cheat! She pretends she's the concierge in order to get tips, and she's really the landlady, she owns everything"—this seemed a plausible revelation—"don't think I didn't see through her from the first"—this was certainly false—"but listen, they're all cheats, they've gall enough for anything, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that chauffeur goes ahead and sues. —Enoch thinks he will, you know. It'll just be spite if he does. Are they all out of my hair, those damn feathers?" She shook herself delightedly and looked around her. I almost thought she was in search of another shoe to throw, but instead her quickly darkening eye lit on the ENCHIRIDION. "What's that filthy little book you're fooling with?"

"I'm not fooling with it, I'm drying it."

"You're always fooling with something filthy," she said, staring.

"It's what I found. See, the pages are all stuck."

"Oh for goodness' sake! Found
where?
I've already asked you half a dozen times, haven't I?" she complained, picking up both pieces between two fingers and dangling the bunched leaves.

"In the grass. Where the bicycle was. It fell off."

"What?"

"It fell off his
bike.
There were a whole lot of books strapped on. Nick's bike, I mean."

"Don't say that!" she cried.

"Say what?" I wondered, undistressed.

"That name, Nick."

"Isn't that his name? I thought you
said
it was his name."

"It doesn't matter. As far as you're concerned he has no name."

"But what can I call him?"

"He's nothing to you," she said fiercely. "You don't have to call him anything."

"He isn't coming back?"

"You can bet he isn't!" Spitefully she let the halves of the little book drop to the ground.

"Not even to get his book? I mean after he sees it's missing.

"To get his book!" she sneered; all her good humor was gone. Angrily she slapped away a feather caught in her sleeve. "That's how you catch germs, haven't I told you often enough?—grabbing at every dirty thing you see. First those bullet-things, now this."

"It's not a dirty thing," I objected. "It's a real book—it's got pictures of flowers. Look, it's full of flowers." I handed it up to her, insisting. "What's that word mean?"

She absorbed it for the first time. "Enchiridion? I don't know, a manual, I think. I think that's what it means. Like a handbook. I had something called Enchiridion once—" But she trailed off purposelessly. "Let me see it." She took the limp pages and began to read out words here and there, elliptically: "Touch-Me-Not. False American—What a sneak. Oh. what a sneak."

"One of those you read is poisonous," I said enthusiastically. "You chew it and it kills you."

But my mother's look was rooted in print. "False American Hellebore," she repeated. "Touch-Me-Not. Ah, that sneak! That petty sneak! He'd try anything!"

"Is he a gardener?" I asked.

"Who?"—She lifted her head suddenly.

I blew out a recklessly defiant, but soft, sigh. "Nick," I pronounced it.

"A gardener? Who said he's a gardener?"

"Because of the flowers," I said, "a whole book full of flowers."

"Well, what of it?"

I turned briefly silent at the uncalculating oddity of her reprimand: hadn't I expected her to be pleased by the private visitor's artless droppings? But she did not think them artless. She rubbed her foot in the feathered lawn and speculated; now and then her blouse grew vast With agitation, although she tried to shield her big bold breathing with an arm flung across her chest—but I was not so much curious as disappointed.

"Can I take it with me, to look at on the ship?"

"No," said my mother.

In reaction I began to negotiate. "But when it dries the pages will come all unstuck, won't they? And there'll be more flowers."

"You can do without flowers," said my mother.

"I only want to look at the pictures."

"No. You'll be sick anyway. You've never once
not
been sick on a boat."

"I won't be if I have something to do. I mean something to look at."

"Not this." She glared. "What do you want
this
for?"

"I don't know. I just want it." I really did not know, so I said what sounded to me the most reasonable. "I want it for a souvenir."