Trust (27 page)

She broke out wrathfully, "A souvenir! A souvenir actually! If I thought you knew what you were talking about I'd dap you—I did it before and I can do it again, / don't mind. If Enoch hadn't had to leave, he'd know what to do with you!" she exclaimed in her illusion of her husband's assured competence with me—if only he had been willing to extend himself. She spun out a little thread of suspicion. "Just what do you imagine it's a souvenir
of?
"

I was afraid, assessing her predictable ire, to say the truth—that I had coveted the blue bicycle, and would have liked to think of hellebore and jewelweed riding it—and said instead, "Of—him" because I did not dare just then to brave his name.

A fever blossomed in her face. "I told you he's nothing to do with you! It's that Dutchwoman," she informed herself, "she filled you with things. How I'd like to get my hands on her!"

"I can feed her poison flowers," I politely offered, "if you want," disposing on my mother's palely clenched knuckles a smile of peace grown out of imagined vengeance: here was the villainous Anneke on the beach, she who had threatened to send me among the fearsome Arabs, sucking on a stem of hellebore; she sucked, and sucked again, and fell delightfully dead.

"Where did you get this?" persisted my mother.

"I
told
you. In the grass."

"When?"

"Before. While you were still asleep."

But she was not satisfied. "
She
didn't give it to you? Anneke?"

"It fell off his bike and I found it," I said again. "If he doesn't come back for it it's mine, isn't it?"

"He won't come back," my mother said grimly.

"Then it's mine," I said. "Losers weepers."

"It's nobody's," she said, and marched across the lawn of feathers to where the iron rain-barrel stood under a black halo of flies; with an arced and lifted arm long-sleeved as a judge's she let fall the little ENCHIRIDION. Hellebore and jewelweed splashed down; up charged the flies in broken battalions. "There," said my mother, returning, stirring up around her heels as she walked a white downy dust: "I know what to do with his little props—he came with the tools of his trade, all right! It just surprises me he didn't bring along a black silk hat to pull them out of. You didn't happen to find a black silk hat too?"

"You threw it in the barrel," I said bitterly.

"Well, where else? It's as good a place as any to toss a dead rat."

"It wasn't a dead rat It was flowers."

"Literal mind! All right, withered leaves then. I got rid of a few withered leaves."

"But it's mine, I wanted to take it with me." I regarded her with dull shock. "You threw it away."

"Why not? I can't think of a better fate for the rose of yesteryear. —Never mind, what's the matter? Don't stand there pop-eyed! What did you expect me to do?" she demanded; her scowl was creased with guilt. "It's a dead rat, believe me. Dead rats have to be disposed of, otherwise they bring the plague."

"It was mine," I accused.

"You're mistaken. Anyhow we're going now. Come on."

"But I wanted it for the ship, it belonged to me."

"To you!" But though she exclaimed, her face was stolid. "Don't tell
me
who it belonged to!"

"I found it."

She strained between not-speaking and speech.

"I bought it," she sent out at last "Or a copy just like it, it doesn't matter. The point is it's mine, and it's nothing I'd forget easily. I don't forget things! I bought it from one of those stalls in the Southampton station, passing through, and used it the whole winter Afterward. You don't think I'd forget a thing like that, do you?"

Just that moment it was almost as though she were talking to Enoch.

"In the winter?" I wondered, interested at once. "In the woods?"

"Don't be a fool—woods, what do you mean woods?" Immediately she was restored and conscious only of addressing me, and not another. "I had to have realism, I had to have everything right, I couldn't make botanical errors, I didn't dare. I'm not that sort of person, slipshod. I had to have it for the picnic," she emphasized.

But I only asked again, "In the middle of the winter?"

She hissed at my stupidity. "For
Marianna Harlow,
" she clarified with scorn.

Then I remembered about the flower-eating scene. My mother had once or twice recounted this to me: she regarded it as her legacy from Poe. "It's the horror part," she reminded me, this being the reason she would never again attempt another novel. On account of this scene alone, she maintained, she had used herself up. It had taken her three months to write, and had exhausted her gift. "When it comes to invention, I'm an empty mine. I show evidences of former deposits, and once in a while I cough up a few crystals, but there's not enough ore left for commercial exploitation." This, Enoch liked to interpret, meant merely that she was lazy; he was always suggesting subjects, usually historical. "I can just imagine your mother's treatment of Genghis Khan! Ivan the Terrible! Bloody Mary! Oedipus Rex with dripping eyesockets! God giving the tablets to Moses with the mountain suddenly blowing up underfoot!" For he knew that she had a weakness for volcanoes.

"What chapter was that?" I inquired.

"The picnic? Thirteen," she said ominously.

"Then you weren't married to William any more?"

"I was working on Thirteen just before you were born." She stood with her head drooping, thickened by melancholy. From the windows of the house came the savage noises of a freshly-declared war. The bridal pairs were being driven out. The voice of the concierge's deaf husband cawed like an iron hinge. "It snowed all the time," my mother reminisced, but it was not clear whose birth this sign had marked—the difficult and remarkable chapter's, or mine. "It may have been trite, but I had to have the thunder and lightning," she admitted, "for the effect."

"In the
snow?
"—although, recalling her plot, I knew better.

"Don't be silly. In the chapter. Marianna invites all the factory folk"—"factory folk" was a phrase which appeared often in my mother's egalitarian fiction—"for an outing in her father's gardens—she's naturally against privately-owned pleasure domes. Of course the foreman comes too, and then an electric storm breaks out—"

My mother slung her long hands around the back of her neck, tilting her head upward to catch the sunlight in her uncertain nostrils; she put one foot behind another, and rooted her toes for story-telling. Recollecting, she transmuted sadness to vanity there and then, despite the absurdity, despite the disparity of tale and auditor. Enough that she had an auditor, even if it were only I; nothing seemed unlikely, not the hour, not that hostile spot, not even myself listening, and since she did not think herself strange, I did not question my own impression; I only flinched at having to hear her tiresomely recite. She charmed herself; she plumbed her plot; she paled at her own ingenuity.

"—and Marianna and Deirdre and the foreman all run for shelter into the factory-owner's greenhouse, where he grows thousands of flowers, exotic and poisonous types, because he always wanted to be a doctor and develop a new drug—" She interrupted herself pleasurably, glad to sustain the telling. "His father wouldn't hear of it—his father insisted on his becoming vice-president of the factory. And Enoch said"—she laughed aloud—"Enoch said that's what made him anti-labor, an autocratic temperament derived from a lifelong frustration. It was a rebellion against the father-figure, with the pattern repeating itself in his own attitude toward labor, which he regarded as a type of rebellious offspring..."I had no idea of her meaning; did she intend to go on standing there the whole afternoon, marooning me on an island of boredom? "Enoch thinks
Marianne
's psychoanalytical! So maybe I owe more to Freud than to anybody. —Well, come on, let's get out of here," she finished suddenly.

She caressed her lips with her tongue in imitation of a movie-star's slowly burgeoning emotion, lowered her hands, and looked at me almost hopefully, as though I might unexpectedly blink out encouragement.

But I only clung to my resentment all the harder. "Anyway I don't see what you needed that flower book for."

"For the drug!" she cried. "What do you think? I couldn't have done without it."

I pursued logically, "If you couldn't do without it then why did you throw it away?"

"What a brat you are, a born little vulture. You'd eat your own mother." But she said this abstractedly, depressed. She was still musing over the triumph of her scene, and I was all at once petrified at the notion that—in spite of her palm reaching out to tap me toward the cobbled road—she would plunge into a review of all the rest of it. Her conscientious but self-absorbed unfolding of it, slangy, quick, always gave me a sense of unease, almost of guilt, as though, beneath the story, some buried and repugnant symbol mouldered. The story itself was foolishness, and was, I learned long afterward, pretentiously based on some Korean myth or other which my mother had gotten, not from a book, but from a guide in one of the upstairs galleries of the British Museum. Two sisters, alike as two rice flowers in beauty but one pledged to evil and the other to good (on different sides in the class struggle, in my mother's version), are rivaling for the love of a single hero: they take him captive to their glass house and tease him into eating strange plants, each to lure him from the other; but alas, the wicked girl, by means of mysteriously sweet and brilliant petals, instead of converting his heart, succeeds only in sending him straight asleep in her sister's arms. "It was a sedative instead of an aphrodisiac," my mother smirked. "I had to know the details of that, didn't I? I couldn't make up a drug out of the thin air without research, could I? I mean it was a question of the chemistry of flowers. Don't think I didn't study all winter about aphrodisiacs in all sorts of queer books!" She pretended, however, to have inadvertently erred: "Don't ask me to explain that word, it's not for you."

But I had already been given a definition, long ago, by my stepfather. "Enoch said they're things to make somebody love you who doesn't. Like the apple Eve picked for Adam."

"Well, if you think you know absolutely everything!" said my mother, exasperated, and at the same time pleased. She was pleased whenever T quoted Enoch, as though it were a particular merit in me to choose to do so, even if it revealed to her that her husband thought Genesis almost as psychoanalytical a book as
Marianna Harlow.
"Besides, you can't make somebody love you who doesn't. If you try, they only love you less. Afterward they hate you and want revenge for your having loved them. Don't drag behind, let's go," she said, tugging at my elbow with a listlessness appropriate to her philosophizings. But I did not follow after. Screeches and bellows enflamed the porch, and turning toward the house I saw the turbulent wedding party dance out barefoot—Guy, Irène, Paul, Thérèse. They swarmed across the lawn, searching for their shoes in the feathers, lit by midsummer midday, honeyed over by jubilance. They were all of them uncompromisingly, lavishly blond, like a covey of cousins, the bridegrooms long-haired with straight formless columns fluting downward over their brows, the brides shorn short, the division in the nape like a dark ravine as they bent. Their naked heels were black. They raced across the dewy grass like Greek runners, chasing one another in an impromptu game that half resembled tag, and half something Biblical: the honeymooners cast out from Paradise by two croaking angels, more or less toothless, beating staffs of broken bread upon the lintel of Eden. My mother rounded the hedge; but the girls between them took hold of the rain-barrel by its rusty rings, and displaying exaggerated winces, groaning at its weight, they raised themselves on their strong toes and tipped it. Out ran Niagara—rain, and rags, and fats, and innumerable chicken bones, and fish-heads, and all my shells one behind the other in a clanging cascade, and the private visitor's ENCHIRIDION like a frigate in that horrendous sea; the laden water sped and spread, tumbling out a crazy river down toward the road, cutting through the coverlet of feathers, now and then lifting one in its current, where it might have been mistaken for a white fern swirling. And "Hurry up!" called my mother from the other side of the hedge; and "What a stench!" I came slowly, reluctant, watchful: the iron barrel fell to the ground dumping thunder, and rocked twice, and lay like a toppled urn. On its side it had a certain mythological beauty—an idol thrown down. The spew trickled off innocently. Meanwhile the bridegrooms had snatched up twigs and were playing at catching the hoops of my shells over the points, dabbling them in the sluice. The brides took turns aiming their shoes at the hedge-duck's tail. Guy, Thérèse, Paul, Irène. The sun lived in the flanks of all their sheeny heads; and on the porch, not minding the stink, the concierge's husband stopped up his plaints with a big bite of bread.

But the concierge stamped on the floorboards and howled.

"Barbarians," muttered my mother behind the bush, "they're just what this place deserves"—and her high heels wavered with great delicacy between the cobblestones.

I went dismally down the hill behind her, and halfway along spied the flag. It was not a true flag. It was only an old handkerchief printed over with Stars and Stripes, not even the right number of each, and a long rip in the middle where the stick had pierced it. A car had run it over; it was ragged and soggy, and I left it where I found it. Ahead of me, my mother's back was sentry-straight—only her ankles were unsure. She picked her way down the hill and never noticed this patriot's handkerchief, although she had been talking of loyalty and Othello only yesterday. "Why are you hanging back like that?" she shouted, vexed at the honeymooners and at me for having interrupted
Marianna.
With admirable exactitude she resumed. "The fact is"—she balanced just then on the crown of a stone—"I mean, what with the three of them locked in the greenhouse, and the lightning stabbing through the glass walls and flooding all the flowers and the erotic
scent
of the flowers, and both sisters in love with the same man, and him not only of another class but, well, actually out cold and lying limp, no wonder they said it was spine-tingling!" she praised herself. We had come to the bottom of the road. Without warning two taxis jumped into being, begging at the curb. Their rear doors gaped. My mother waved off the first as a sign of vengeance, and leaned down to rub her shin until she was satisfied the walk down had left her without a crack; then we drove off to the station with the favored man. The seats were threadbare plush and alive with heat. Asthma choked the driver. "To think that I could write of eating flowers, just flowers, and scare myself, and call it horror! When it was all just flowers, and I never saw them really, just colored pictures in a book..." My mother's forefinger ticked against her cheek. "I didn't know what horror was!" Inside the cab, for an act of mercy and as though it were a flower, she took my hand. But sweat ran from the underside of my knuckles and she surrendered me to myself with a grunt. "Ah, you're clammy. You don't feel clean." She sat in silence, listening to the driver cough for his lungful of air, while the wheel wobbled and a vein at his wrist bulged. I suppose we were in danger of dying of his disease (we had joggled over to the wrong side of the narrow road and were struggling to joggle back again) and wondered whether my mother would construe this as a punishment for having snubbed the other taxi, but the windows did not draw her eyes; she kept them for herself, and let her anger loiter where it pleased, and was all at once stung by the worse danger of enlightenment—she seemed to see: "He brought it in case I didn't remember! As though I couldn't remember without his little showpieces! The tools of his trade!" And she spat out the window, although we were within two yards of the station.