Trust (35 page)

The town. I wished just then to be touched by the town—to see it burnished, tender, as accessible as anything imaginary. It ought to have made me weep, since it was (that morning) Camelot I was after; an odd remorse, balf-consolatory, half-accusing, teased me down the street. I felt clogged with mean failures, quite as though I had fallen short of some expectation not my own, yet was, on that account, not altogether to blame. A new town, or square, or even bit of unknown wall, should tell us what we were meant to be: when where-we-are is strange, the self is all at once familiar. Then—according to this redoubtable traveler's notion (an ancient remark of my stepfather's set upside down: in his more metaphysical version, the self first feels the alien singularity of its identity among old scenes and long-apprehended things)—every new place is Camelot, cold, far, polished, secretive and shut-up, full of the happiness of others. The happiness of others!—the possible, the probable, the likely, and then at length, since there is no test for it but belief, the certain. If in my progress through Main Street I fell short of happiness, it was just the measure of that distance between New and Old Rochelle the French pilgrims, in christening their town, had upheld in sad celebration: a necessary distance separating the haven which is fact from the coveted impossible. And we in the same way feel toward the happiness of others as though already a dozen dozen times we had sent out a lamentation, Oh, here is my old home, and I am banished from it; and even though we may never have been there before, we long to return. All facts are aloof; still Camelot lures: the happiness of others, behind a wall. And when we suppose that what we were meant to be is at last revealed to us—look! it is so ingenuous as to be pitiable: only to be happy. Who believes he was ever fated for anything else? Who does not invoke justice to save him from the haven where reluctantly he counts his despondent comforts? Who does not curse the single unreachable moment in his past when an ogreish craft wizened and despoiled his proper destiny? And who does not remember the untried exaltation at the crest of life, when he knew himself to be extraordinary, when he believed in the power of purity and thought beauty a commonplace? Happiness always has the texture of memory, even when it is the happiness of others. What never was is irrevocable. Well, and if on that early walk past shops as still as windless flags, where no one stood in doorways, I seemed to quote Enoch to myself too much, the fault was not all mine. Perhaps if he had been willing to be, as my mother wished, the father-surrogate and deputy of my course, I might have thrown him over, as one
does
throw over fathers and regents, saws and sceptres and all. And William too: would I have cared to fly to his consultive closet if he had not shut the door? But this was all theory—and, to make it appear even more suspect, my mother's theory withal. It had a touch of Freud.

As for myself, I ran clear of theories, and merely wandered this way and that, thinking where I might go. I went out like an explorer—not to find a destination, but a route. The difference is sly but imperative. So I voyaged past the silly
little City Hall, a squat adobe like a whitewashed toy with a cupola and window-frames painted a whimsically brilliant blue, and submitted at length to the big blank stores. They took me in as though I were no more than a lozenge for their raw taste—first the yellow-paneled Grant's and then the red-and-gold Woolworth's and finally the wide bright tunnel of Bloomingdale's basement, full of foreign crockery. These places rocked and sucked me; I swam round and round the counters, touring housewares, now and then darting in and out of the road after vanishing taxis. The slothful advance of morning, moving encumbered by heat and an ungainly heaviness of atmosphere toward noon, pushed me in the way of my intention. I meant to have my confrontation after all, but in isolation, behind a partition, in a box, in the dark, in an eyeless place untrafficked by any witness: William trapped, in short, by the insularity of my demand. Insularity: it was an island I was headed for; they would have me be Robinson Crusoe without any of the skills or imaginings of civilization, and worse, without a memory of how I came to be swept to that shore. But I was bent on learning that mariner's tale, and purposed to have it from William, and spaciously—and not from the protected domestic grateful William, rescued and' relieved by his wife's commanding dip-of-head telegraphing confidence and support and, so refined her sense of the appropriate, abhorrence of whatever vulgar intimations intrusion might trick itself out in, but instead from the severe and noble William, the grand monarch of those Wall Street treasure-houses connecting partner with partner: from that William who came discreetly to my mother's table, rubbing his mouth with an embossed napkin as though wine-sauce were an evil ointment, and waiting with all the simplicity of a privately taciturn spirit for the moment that justified his dinner—the yielding up of the gilt-edged envelope. And once my mother had spoiled the ceremonious transmittal with a disconsolate joke—"guilt-edged," said she, spelling it softly and with mock earnestness. "Oh, I don't see why you feel that, Allegra," he responded; he drew his gloves up over his fine wrists; she had, by that, reflected on his dignity, perhaps even on his charitableness. He had in her presence always the bearing of a wounded man. Long ago she had wounded him. He was still afraid of her jokes. He continued to think of her as a radical, and never heard her laugh without listening to the high sound of ridicule. "It's not that I mind being a capitalist," she amended it, to please him with a kinder fancy, and took from him the thickness of the prodigious envelope: "Only it's almost obscene, the way the thing reproduces itself." She always spoke of her trust fund as "the thing," as though it were somehow too unreal to deserve classification or a name. "I mean I never
do
anything about it; nobody does. It's like a virgin birth," she gave out, in spite of herself, and was so struck by her image that she failed to look regretful at having brought it off. "Parthenogenesis! It happens only with bees and money." William—exemplary even when disconcerted—regarded his clothed palms with a secret distress. "Ah," said he, "but you can't
rely
on the bees," and hurried into his overcoat like a man of daring. William the man of daring! Exemplary William! William the abashed crypto-adorer of my mother! And—this chiefly—dragon William, guardian of the moat, keeper of the riddle of the castle, warder of the lightly-laden envelopes with their dazzling seals and golden margins, castellan of their ark, governor of the place where the money bred, invisibly, overnight, like bacteria in a jar, at dusk, at closing-time, at three o'clock, in the hour of the market's hush, in the holy moment of the maturation of a bond: this inflexible, serious and sincere, altogether upright and responsible man of business,
this
William, William as trustee, William as inmost bursar of the treasure-house where the treasure was unseen and intangible though rigidly codified, William at the source: this William I meant to see.

At ten I drank a chocolate ice-cream soda; it seemed meal enough. At two I bought, for no reason at all, a small square aluminum dipper with a long handle. The lip said Detroit. It would not fit in my coat pocket, so I threw away the paper bag it was wrapped in and swung it. I told myself its use would be to remind myself of the heavens—of the North Star, which the Dipper admonishes. But all day long the taxi-drivers could not be persuaded to venture out. They came to the curb, listened, and ground away with shakes of their dwarfish, dull, droll heads. "Wall Street? Wall Street?" they echoed, and slammed their doors against my pleas. "Sooner kick myself alia way downa Canarsie," they reproved me. And they said, "No than'
kew!
" And they said, "That's where they send you Judgment Day, put you up 'gainst it and shoot you"—gesturing with dirty cuffs and denying me, though I wheedled repeatedly. "Well, look, I'll pay the empty fare
back,
" I urged, holding up the sidereal token like a wand of hope. But afterward I put it to better purpose, and reached out with the handle and tapped insistently on the cab-windows. It brought none of them back. It brought a curse. Under the colorless sun I felt parched and fruitlessly rich.

Nevertheless twenty-five dollars at length bought my passage.

"Why not?" said the driver, glancing downward with a mild show of acquiescence. Curiously pleased with the translucence of his pink knuckles as they lay, delicate, without vitality, like shells picked off a beach, over the halted wheel, he lowered a noble neck and the pale stretched cheekbones of the heir of some wondrous lost kingdom, aware, though not haughtily, of his sovereignty: he was a stark albino. "I don't mind," he told me cheerily. "Once I took a guy to Albany, he was suffering from nalmutrition."

"From what?" said I.

"Nalmutrition."

"Oh," I said, and leaned back. "I'm very grateful, though."

"Sure, that's all right. Listen, you know the name of that guy in the Bible that itched?"

"Itched?"

"Yeah, itched himself on this piece of old flowerpot.
You
know."

I did know. "You mean Job?" This was the harvest of the College Survey of English Literature.

"Yeah, that's the one, Jobb. Only you gotta announce it the right way for this saying I thought up." He felt my inquisitive stare rooted in his back and challenged it in his mirror. "Don't be embarrassed. Everybody looks at me, I don't mind. I got white hair like an old man, I'm only thirty-three. My grandmother's eighty-two, she got practically no white hair yet. I don't mind—I figure it's like everybody's gotta be famous for
something,
right?"

I agreed, but lacked zeal.

"Anthony Eden is an albino," he confided.

"Oh, I don't think so—"

"So was Mussolini. Anybody can tell you that, don't take
my
word for it."

It was plain that I had better resign myself to the fact of his conversation, and I reluctantly did. There are cultists who take the view that everything is Experience, no matter how mean, absurd, or inane, and that Experience has value for its own sake. I did not hold with this, being metaphysically flaccid; but, being flaccid, had no choice just then beyond gaping out the window and thinking how odd the world was.

"You know the Supreme Court of the United States?" my pilot demanded.

I admitted to it.

"Three of them judges."

"Really?"

"Albino. Take my word for it," he assured me, reversing his rhetoric.

"Well, they don't look it."

"Don't look it!" he mimicked darkly. "
I'll
say they don't." Though we were crossing a bridge, he glared around at me and I nodded earnestly to get him to turn frontward again. "They—dye—themselves," he pronounced with priestly scorn. "Eyebrows. Eyelashes. The works."

He was so severe that I had to inquire, "Job too?"

"Hah?"

"You mentioned something about Job—"

"Jobb!" he corrected me impatiently. "I didn't say nothing like that about Jobb."

"He wasn't an albino?"

"Where'd you get a nutty idea like that?" he yelled over his shoulder. "I said Jobb, I meant about this saying I thought up. Jobb from the
Bible.
My club, we wanna use it, you know, like sometimes when we go collecting dues? You know, a motto, like, 'Get on the Jobb and Relieve Our Itch for Money.' You think that's any good, anybody'll get it?"

"It
might
be hard to get."

He pondered this lugubriously. "I mean it's kind of like a gag?" he ventured.

"Anyway," I consoled, "it's not bad."

He brightened at once. "Yeah, that's what I thought. See, I knew this guy once that itched as bad as Jobb practically. He was a leopard," he told me.

"Is that so?" I said with interest. "Where?"

"Up in New Haven."

"New Haven,
Connecticut?
"

"Yeah, he was in a bad way up there."

"There aren't any lepers in New Haven," I protested.

"This guy was a leopard,
he
was from New Haven. One night his whole jaw fell right off. He was brushing his teeth, same as anybody would, and all of a sudden—pff! the whole thing dropped bang into the sink, all them teeth and everything stuck straight in the bone, you know? All in one piece." His rear-view mirror accused me sternly, damning me for a skeptic. "That's a medical fact," he concluded.

At these absorbing words, full of scientific connoisseurship, a settled good will, almost an affection, passed diffidently but wholesomely between us. He was a man of judicious parts, though young. His hair grew wispily long over his big unashamed ears, whiter than paper; his nape bore a crowd of strangely unpigmented mole-like speckles, too diminutive to be really ugly—it was as though he had been splattered with invisible ink. In someone else they would perhaps have been no more curious than freckles. I fixed on them, and they seemed to thicken; so, meanwhile, did our friendship; so, meanwhile, did the traffic. We had long talkative waits under stubborn lights, the motor slackened in expectation of the click that foretold green, and, all around us, the silver herd pressing near.

He had other acquaintances. They were all extraordinarily stricken. One—a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey—was a victim of yaws. Another, who lived in Philadelphia, suffered from trachoma, and had actually had to give up television, the flies got so much in the way. These cases were not in the least unusual. Rampant tropical diseases afflicted the East Coast of the United States, the most dangerous area in the world (he explained) for one's health. He knew of a malarial outbreak in Dobbs Ferry; he was certain of five instances, possibly six, of bubonic plague in the Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Presently, persuaded that he had plainly won both my confidence and my admiration, he invited me to join his organization, which was dedicated to stamping out yellow fever in the Bronx. Its slogan was "Don't Be Yellow—Join the Fight." He told me with a touch of conceit that he had invented this himself. "Of course you got to pay the dues," he apologized, "if you come in with us." He also offered further data on the world's hidden albinos. It developed that the following were deficient in melanin: Princess Margaret Rose, John Foster Dulles, the young Aga Khan, two television comedians whose names I never did get right, and Booker T. Washington.