Trust (3 page)

Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck alone endured and transcended—if not corporeally, then in the actuality of his nature. It was an extraordinary victory—he could not be ousted. Hè took her money, I imagined, as a man takes a trophy—with a modest smile, yet smelling conquest. But if she did not yield it up for alms' sake, still less could it have been in tribute to used-up desire. Between them lay waste and silt and the endless shards of my father's yellow beach, and the long barren shoal. They had left that old time depleted. It was not love or the memory of love—and yet something active, present, and of the moment festered there: some issue turned mysteriously in the sand. My mother felt its sting under her hand that March, as our private sirocco blew woe into all the rooms, upstairs and downstairs; and not long afterward the empty envelope in Enoch's desk acquainted me with Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck, and not only with that unknown name, but with how much they had paid him, and in what sequence, and how much was promised for later, all rapidly registered in Enoch's hook-like unmistakable pencilled digits—and what gave it away was March. I saw that they had last sent money to this person in March. It was all obscure; it was all penetrating; and what gave it away, as I say, was March. To whom else would those sums (in amounts not impossible, not unreasonable, remarkable rather for their disjointed recurrences) have gone in the very month when my father's perspiring ghost breathed the money-stckness into the secret fissures of our lives?

But I did not tell my mother any of this. It comforted her to think that I was unaware; I pretended that some oddity of intuition, or else an accidental and unremembered word, had brought me to my father's identity. I did not say that I knew him to be a mendicant and a leech. Nevertheless, she was careful to turn the key to Enoch's desk, and during the tranquil period that followed I heard nothing of that languid merchant of the past, that inventor or sailor, that homme de génie, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck.

My mother decided that the "arrangements" which were to send me to Europe should begin the moment Enoch returned from Geneva.

"They'll have to clear you for a passport," she explained. "And that means they'll have to clear
me
"

"But you already have a passport. You've been cleared."

"They'll have to clear me again, watch and see. The Government is very simple-minded when it comes to these matters. After all, I
was
a Party member. I am the author of
Marianna Harlow
.'

"Well, I'm not the author of anything."

"Only because you have no talent. At your age I had already published in the
Worker.
It was a letter to the editor. I think it was about strikes. Not that I knew anything about strikes," she added accommodatingly, "but I thought I ought to have them on my conscience."

"It's a free country," I pursued. "I don't see what my passport has to do with
you.
"

"Guilt by association," my mother said glibly. "You could tell them you went away to college and didn't associate with me for the whole four years. It's practically the truth. Anyway, Enoch will take care of it Hell see some people who can simplify things. God knows how, with my record."

My mother, with typical perversity, was very proud of her "record," which she exaggerated in order to shock. As I understood it, she had joined the Party the very season she was to have come out: it was the first, possibly the most flamboyant, of her scandals. She showed me clippings of the event-it was her habit to save everything that had ever been printed about her—and crowed over them as though they had been fresh that morning. "Debutante Puts Solvent Daddy in the Red," one said. There was even a picture of her holding up a banner—The World in One Peace." It all looked stale—the slogans, and my mother as a young girl, and the date on the newspaper. "I wasn't the only, one to get interested in the working class," she defended herself, "of people of our
background,
I mean," and she began to name several sons and daughters of wealthy families, some of them famous, who had taken jobs in factories. In my mother's factory—she was fired after two weeks, not for inciting the workers, but for inefficiency—they made chocolates. "It wasn't a
bad
place," she reflected; "the washrooms were very clean. But I couldn't tell the cherry creams from the plain cherries—they were the same shape only the creams had a different sort of curlicue on top—and I packed them into all the wrong boxes, and three whole shipments were sent out mixed up like that, and then they let me go. And after that we all came and picketed. Then it began to rain and we tried to go inside to get dry, and they sent for the police."

"Then what happened?"

"Naturally they arrested us. I think it was for trespass. Anyway, your grandfather was so angry he wouldn't put up the bail. The other parents did, but they really
were
working-class, so it made sense for them—and that left me there overnight all alone. It was rather nice, though. It's where I learned to play bridge."

"In jail?" I marveled.

"Oh, it wasn't a
cell
or anything. We just sat up all night and drank hot cocoa—three policemen and me, and one of them said, 'If she plays, we've got a fourth,' and they taught me how."

I thought I recognized this scene. "Isn't that in
Marianna Harlow?
"

"Oh, God." My mother scowled. "Those gangsters. Those thieves. Do you know that in the Soviet Union I'm still a best-seller? Among American writers second only to Jack London! I'm even ahead of Howard Fast." These remarks were familiar: this was my mother's favorite complaint, for she had not received any Russian royalties since 1936. "Oh, I know what I'm talking about when I say they're capable of anything," she offered indignantly whenever the question of the purges came up. "After all, twenty-one years of open robbery!"

I had never read
Marianna Harlow;
try as I would, I could manage only a part here, a part there, but never the whole from beginning to end. It was an astonishing novel. It had no style, its unhinged dialogue was indistinguishable from my mother's own prattling, and its chief influence seemed to have been
The Bobbsey Twins
(in fact, it was about twins); and yet it had had a great success. "They said it sold so well on account of my
social
position; they said it was the absurdity that appealed, but really it was because of the plot," my mother contended, and she undertook to recount it to me. "You see, the good sister, that's Marianna, sides with the foreman when he's accused of the murder of her father, and the jealous capitalist sister, that's Deirdre, goes prowling around the factory one night in order to plant evidence against Marianna, and there's a terrible fire, and she's cremated—well, it's all in the synopsis on the jacket," and she pulled one copy from a row of identical volumes. " The glorification of man and labor,' " she read diligently, " 'as shown through the conflict of a pair of beautiful twins, children of an unscrupulous manufacturer, over their father's dismissal of a progressive-minded foreman whom both girls love.'—Of course," said my mother humbly, "the proletarian novel is out of fashion now, and I make no claim to immortality..."

Although my mother's subjects were passion and death, Enoch regarded
Marianna Harlow
as a piece of comic art. He repeatedly told me that I should, read it, that in spite of its bad prose I would not regret it, that it was a prize example of the lampoon, and that he had often thought of recommending it to the State Department as a work of counter-propaganda. My mother was pleased. "It's the difference between William and Enoch!" she cried. "William hated
Marianna
It's no coincidence that, the divorce came right in the middle of Chapter Twelve—you know—where Marianna organizes the workers' council? William won't talk of it now, but at the time he called it anarchism—it just petrified him, you know, but Enoch says that if the government had had it translated it would have saved China." The notion of
Marianna Harlow's
saving China threw my mother into her chair, laughing.

"Then it seems to me there's very little danger of my not getting a passport," I said practically.

"Oh my dear! You don't understand," my mother assured me, very much in earnest, "it's
me
that's the obstacle. I'm afraid I shall always stand in your way in regard to official matters. They know who I am, after all. They know what I have been. What do you think the F.B.I, is for? Poor Enoch! He could have been Ambassador by now, you know, if not for me."

"Oh really," I said, "it has nothing to do with you."

"Doesn't it?" she answered haughtily. "I was a member of five subversive organizations. I belonged to Women for Peace and Equality, The Common Man Club, The League for Enlightened Socialism..."

"You've repudiated all that."

"Do you suppose for one
minute
that makes any difference to the F.B.I.? They think I
still
care about Peace and Equality. Every time I go out of the country they send
spies.
The last time I was at the Baroness' place there was a woman getting fitted for a corset, and I could have sworn she was a government agent She kept writing things down on a little pad."

"Maybe she was only recording her measurements."

"Oh well, if you want to joke about it!" my mother brought out, turning her back on me, offended. "But it's the jesting of an innocent. You young people today confuse patriotism with adulation. You're all practising Shintoists, if you ask me—you think the government exists to be worshipped.
I'll
tell you what it exists for," she declaimed, appraising me bitterly—"to be laughed at! If it can't be laughed at it had better not pretend to be worth anything. Do you think I'm afraid of their spies? I spit in their faces!"

She was obsessed with the idea of spies. It was her theory that Enoch's superiors in Washington required him to go about Europe interviewing people who might be persuaded to inform for them. She thought of him as a roving personnel department looking for malcontents to dress in false beards. And some time later when a cable came from Enoch stating that his business in Geneva would detain him for several weeks more, she did not hesitate to blame it on the Bulgarian whom she had seen from the plane-window. "It's the East European temperament. As a group they're very unstable, yon know; you can see it on every page in Dostoyevsky. It's such a shame—it just spoils July for me, and for no good reason. I can guess what the trouble is. That Bulgarian agent probably wants to start a revolution. They all do out there. After they get their underground movements put together they're always on tenterhooks to blow things up. It's very unwise. They're very impatient people," she observed, looking astute; "I suppose Enoch will talk him out of it." Actually, my mother knew nothing of her husband's official life beyond the indisputable circumstance that he toted a weighty attaché case which was fortified by a combination lock and which he always kept at his side—even at dinner parties it materialized under his place at table, leaning familiarly against his shoe. His peregrinations she regarded as less than convenient, although she was an energetic traveler on her own account. The difficulty was that when
she
was ready for London,
he
had pressing reasons for going to Berlin; and once, having accompanied her as far as Madrid, he discovered he was needed immediately on Cyprus. This was a great trial to my mother, who believed in unpacking thoroughly. Wherever she was she stuffed the bureaus and wardrobes, and could not be expected to vacate them without two days' notice. Hence she frequently found herself abandoned among strangers in foreign hotels, and understandably the urge for notoriety would overwhelm her in these places. She would go out on the streets and hire anyone who looked like a musician and bring back a troop of improbable cellists for an incredible concert in the lobby. Or she would purchase canvas and an easel and go to museums, which bored her for their own sakes, and make outrageous copies of celebrated paintings, disrobing all the chief figures, except of course those already nude, which she would chastely clothe. Sometimes, out of desperation, she would try to make friends, consulting for this purpose a list of local ladies whom Enoch had entreated her to call on. These occasionally turned out to be less fashionable, but invariably more intellectual, than my mother; they would chatter scornfully of "the American language," and they were uncommonly inquisitive about American writers. None of them, to be sure, had ever heard of
Marianna Harlow.
In one city—perhaps it was The Hague—a purple-coifed dowager, a court confidante and patroness of belles lettres, disclosed that one of her pensioners was at that moment engaged in a majestic translation into the Dutch of the poetry of Karlen Dustworth, the Minnesota laureate. My mother was overcome, not by the poet's reputation, or even the translator's, for she had been aware of the existence of neither, but by the idea of patronage, which seemed to her both novel and elegant. When she returned home she went immediately to William and arranged for the establishment of a fund for a poetry pamphlet, to be issued quarterly. She commissioned as editor a young assistant professor of English, with a Belgian accent, who came from the University of Nebraska expressly to sort verses in the narrow office my mother had rented down-town. This project kept her at home for some months, until at last a dispute with the editor over policy concerning assonance rhyme (the editor was for it, my mother was opposed) grew into a hideous quarrel, and he was dismissed, only to be replaced by another young man, /rom New York University, who looked and talked exactly like the first, but hated assonance. She was so delighted with this second literate that she permitted him to have a staff, an extravagance which alarmed William. "It's better than paying
taxes,
isn't it?" she demanded of him shrewdly, although she was altogether ignorant of the rule for charitable trusts and had never seen an income-tax form; at which William, who was a Republican and admired Thoreau, subsided. And my mother went abroad again. She had ceased to travel regularly in the company of Enoch; she maintained it was no use: on the plane he read books instead of talking to her, he was too unpredictable anyhow, he concealed his Washington cables from her, he would leave her, without a moment's remorse, for any spy. He had actually bounded down the entry-ramp at first sight of the Bulgarian, and bounded up again, to snatch his valise and shout farewell; and then he had allowed the Bulgarian, fake beard and all, to kiss him, and in public, an act which was severely prohibited to his wife.