Trust (46 page)

My observation upon arrival? Chiefly, that the place felt familiar. In what respect? In this: that to enter hell and find Tilbeck there was no surprise.

William, who had deliberately denuded my mother's file of everything important, had access to the devil's own dossier. And there were stored and stuffed all those missing papers in the matter of Allegra Vand which William's son had vainly coveted, to redeem, I suppose, his sense of historical order—not a petty but a moral sense: for William's son, in his zeal for personal history, appeared to invest a proper chronology with morality, to wit, "that is good which follows"; and one day, when he would have learned to transpose this uninteresting notion into a more politic one, viz., "that which follows is good," he would indubitably grow into an even cleverer lawyer than his father—"that which follows is good" being a dictum of complete legal probity, especially when applied as heading to a document full of brilliantly concealed tax crimes. But this is digression, though purposeful. Only yesterday my stepfather had defined history as a judgment on humanity; today William's son saw it as a compilation of the appropriate papers. As for William himself, his relation with history lay in his not having any. How was this possible in a mind concerned most of its sentient hours with the law, where presumably precedent governs? But precedent did not govern William's mind, for precedents are only relative, and contradict one another now and then, and anyhow William was a Calvinist, and believed in the foreordained: call it, for brevity's sake, destiny. Destiny is individual, and what has gone before, in similar cases (no matter how similar to, or, as lawyers like zoologically to put it, however truly "on all fours with," the case at hand), is irrelevant. To William, the circumstances of my birth—how indecently priggish and Dickensian that sounds! yet I succumb to this mean phrase out of deference for poor William, who, after showing so much respect initially for the precise terminology and taxonomy of his profession, reverted with relief to another show of respect, which he expressed insultingly in circumlocution and euphemism—the circumstances of my birth, at any rate, implied for him not simple event but a destiny for which I was responsible in the first place and to blame in the second. And not only a destiny, but even a breed of soul which such a destiny might spawn. Those "circumstances," moreover, explained his aversion and clarified his evasions; and all delicately and exquisitely and secretly they gave me a sinister chill, as though, while standing solemnly in court, about to be sentenced, I had caught sight of the god Pan at the window, clutching a bunch of wild flowers, hellebore and jewelweed, and laughing a long and careless jingle of a laugh, like bicycle bells.

So it turned out that—as I have stated—it was the devil's dossier which contained the missing papers. At the same time let it be noted that the devil's dossier was altogether empty. A paradox? No. The papers were missing because they were non-existent. That is the way it is with the devil's file—it is full of lies, and lies, in an absolute sense, have no reality, body, weight, or substance. Lies, being what-is-not, are not there. There were no documents recording my mother's divorce from Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck because there had never been a divorce. There had never been a divorce because there had never been a marriage. If lies
had
reality, body, weight, or substance, there would not be room enough anywhere to keep them in, and the devil would have to appropriate the whole world for a safety-vault.

To this, Enoch—I can hear him!—would say: "Exactly. He
has
appropriated the world, just as you say. Why else is the world so stuffed with lies? The liars are all file-cabinets for the devil." Regarding all plain contrary-to-fact falsehoods perhaps this is so, but it is not so with the lie that is a lie only because the truth has not been uttered. The lie of omission, like the silent hollow within the flute's facile cylinder, cannot be put away, and will continue to plague the universe forever, by virtue of its formlessness, which is dependent on honest forms. An ordinary lie, because it is a simple opposite of what-is, can be contradicted by exposure of its contrary. But the lie of omission is a concealment contradicted by nothing, and bolstered, in fact, by the solidity of the revealed. That Tilbeck existed, I had been told; that he was my father, I had been told. From this I drew the assumption of a marriage; but it was an appearance: a nefarious illusion, worse than a made lie. Rumor and murmur come to kill a made lie; the made lie is tangible and can be cut down. But the omitted pertinent thing, the lie of illusion, falls like a damp pervading smoke. It was by illusion and trick my mother and William had snared me. And Enoch, who had been quiet, who had said nothing, had thereby had his part in it, and was a liar like the others: though a hater of liars.

William began: "The circumstances of your birth—"

"My illegitimacy."

"—of your birth have turned out to be highly useful to a particular individual."

"You mean to my father. Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. Don't think I don't know all my father's names!"

If this was a challenge William did not rise to it, and only said, "In spite of that you have been protected from the beginning."

I said: "I wish I had been protected
from
beginning."

"Sophistry. I don't hide it from you that I regard it as a great pity."

"A pity that I was born."

"I refer only to your mother's behavior."

"My mother's misbehavior."

"I think you had better take a more serious attitude," William said.

"A more humble one, do you mean? Befitting my position in life?"

"Please," he said harshly.

"I believe I'm
not
going to weep."

"Excellent. I'm glad of it. I ask you to be serious, but not irresponsible."

"In other words, not to take after my mother. But I've been better brought up. I haven't been anyone's mistress," I told him, and added guilefully: "So far."

"I also ask you to speak of your mother with"—anxiously he chose the less obvious word—"propriety. I hope it won't be necessary to warn you against bad taste in this matter."

His gravity was both intense and fastidious, and therefore so absurd and piteous that, despite my declaration, I almost wept after all. I came so close to it that I laughed instead, and was surprised: what emerged was bitter shame. "And to think," I brought out, "I always imagined the divorce itself was the thing in bad taste!"

"There was no divorce," William said.

"What you mean is there was only one divorce and not two—one, I suppose, is in better taste than two? In that case my father has improved on things. Unless the first divorce was a sham as well?"

"I won't countenance this—"

But I would not stop for his remonstrance. "If only you'll make it clear that
you
were never married to my mother either," I offered, "it would do away altogether with the taint of divorce, wouldn't it? Think how clean the family escutcheon would be."

"I do not like this talk," William said.

"No. It's dirty, like the escutcheon."

"Look here," he said abruptly, "you don't grasp in what capacity I've been willing to receive you. You will have to understand that I have been your mother's lawyer for a very long time—"

"And something else."

"Her lawyer. I speak to you in that capacity and in no other," he finished.

"And in another," I nevertheless pursued.

"What are you after?"

"You've omitted something. You've been something else, and it makes a difference. It's an influence."

"The trustee. Yes. Very well I've been the trustee," he stated without comfort.

"And the husband."

"Your mother's husband," he observed, "is a Jew named Vand. —You needn't draw on any family relation where none exists." All unwittingly his elevated arm had stretched to the level of the mouth in the portrait behind and above him—the confident, even arrogant, rather flat Huntingdon mouth which my mother, but not I, had inherited. This mouth was the only living feature in that fearsome yet curiously pallid representation of my grandfather; not Sargent, but an imitator, perhaps a pupil, had given posterity those unconcerned angelic nostrils, too spiritual to breathe. But the mouth showed what the man had been: it looked ready to spit.

In the presence of this icon-like carpet-mustached ancestor I inquired of his son-in-law, "And where a family relation
does
exist?"

But William had noted my upward gaze and intercepted it with a force which made all irony of appearances ineffectual. "Is is not was. None exists," he repeated, and became conscious suddenly of his hand in the air; he brought it down and laid it on the desk and solemnly viewed it.

"Your son? I'm speaking of your son. You admit to a family relation
there?
"

"My son," he granted, "is a stranger to this business."

"A stranger?"

"He knows nothing."

"He knows plenty. He knows more than I know."

"I don't see what you're implying. He knows nothing about the circumstances of your—"

"—of my worth," I joined him mockingly. "But he's completely aware of yours."

"You had better be explicit," William said.

"Your son has already been that. I've heard how the trustee failed to live up to the terms of the trust."

"Ah," William said meditating. "He talked to you?"

"He told me about the death on the estate. My mother's estate. —The place they're sending me to, in fact. We went out to one of the cubicles and he told me," I said.

"That's quite outside the proper area of your" interest in this matter. —He talked to you about it?" William said again. He continued to stare at his hand as though it had turned to bronze. "He has no discretion."

"He picked Miss Pettigrew," I slyly acknowledged.

"My son will have to answer for his own recklessness. In every respect."

"And you picked my mother."

"And answered for it."

"By losing her. But you know," I took up, inflamed inexplicably into vehemence, "I always believed you had divorced her on account of, well, on account of
Marianna Harlow!
The terrible Chapter Twelve!" I threw out at him all the infamous jeering incongruity of it: "I thought it was on account of politics! Because she was mixed up with Communists—"

"Communists," he echoed carefully.

Then very gradually and astonishingly I felt between my shoulders the beginning of a kind of jarring, a reverberation: without realizing it I had grown tremulous.

"Your mother divorced
me,
" William corrected, essaying it with impeccable exactitude, as though caution might be relied on to keep his fist as stiff as cast metal. But he began to rock it thoughtfully, like a small bronze pony.

Though nervous, I had to scoff. "That's a gentlemanly technicality."

"However it's a fact."

"So," I said, "was her adultery."

The word struck like a stone against his eyes.

"Don't continue in that language, please."

"I didn't choose the language."

"You are remarkably sullen. I warn you," William said.

"It's Biblical language, isn't it? It says 'adultery' in the Decalogue—in that case I'm perfectly sure I can't be blamed for the language, can I? Though maybe you might blame Enoch."

He looked up wearily.

"You just
said
he's a Jew. They invented the Bible, you know. Blame
them.
"

He did not move. "I blame the sinner for the sin."

"I hate religion," I said.

"Then you hate God."

"No," I said. "God hates me."

So we came to a standstill at hatred. We came to it quickly; and we stopped there. Where else could we have stopped? For William, hater of adultery, it was Christian duty. For me it was plain pagan philosophy. I hated William not because he had failed to become my father according to respectable plan; I hated my mother not because she had borne me in wildness and reared me in tame constraint; I hated my father not because secretly and fearfully I felt his alien and singing bravado in my intellect; I hated Enoch not because he addressed me always with the contempt of repudiation, as though I were a category or an opposite point of view—no, no, I was not so orderly in my hatred, I did not sniff after the weavings of the minor plots of past time. I hated my stepfather, my true father, my almost-father, my mother who had bedded with each of these, because they were the world. That was my whole, broad, and uncontaminated philosophy—scorn for everything that devoured my mind: for the world exactly as it stood; for all phenomena. In existence there
is
no might-have-been, though we contemplate it despairingly. God does not allow returns and beginnings-again-from-the-starting-place. What firmer sign can there be of God's cruelty? He has made the already-accomplished inexorable. We cannot go back to do it over again. There are no rehearsals. Each fresh moment is the real and final thing. Each successive breath is the single penetrable opportunity for its pitiable duration; there is no other, there is no beginning on the morrow, there is only what we have done yesterday, or what has been done to us yesterday; we live on our yesterday's leavings. To God we are inflexible
facts: he does not judge us, any more than we would judge the barnward cow's round dung-tower in the field behind her. Dung is fact. Man is fact. If God were not indifferent to us, we might not be indifferent to each other.

With this indifference—it is the indifference of hopelessness, the indifference of helplessness, the indifference of the badly born; go ask the cripple or the idiot how indebted he is to the world! (God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten dung)—I learned from William what he now began to recount. It was—as I have said—a father's tale, to begin with. I suppose he meant to justify those events of dereliction and death which his son had given me; but rapidly and mysteriously what had begun as the father's tale became a lover's tale. He told it so. He told it with a vocabulary of raw timidity—a lad's vocabulary. He did not own words of what is called, foolishly, mature feeling. Feeling had ended for him even before suffocating life had thrown the cloak of sentience over my unguarded and blackguarded begetting. He did not tell it as I shall tell it, with the crowding of chronology. In fact, as I remember it, the end came first, and little by little the end persuaded the appearance of its various preceding vertebrae, till at last was reached the central matter atop that story's spine; nor was it a long story. It was a story short, slight, and common; but it was not vulgar. If the story had been mine it would, I think, have been vulgar. Godlessness inevitably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. William's story—that golden lover's tale, mythic as Troilus'—was (though golden, though mythic) short, slight, common, but not vulgar. Into William's ken my mother had swum like an act of God.