Trust (47 page)

In those days there were dances. They might have been thought of anthropologically—not that such a notion would ever occur to the dancers. Visualize the girls (women now, pitifully transmuted, arms and necks distorted, so that nothing glimmers of what was but the very inmost light of the eye-pupil, where the self knows the self)—girls in white dresses, my mother among them, in the not-quite-white of a gull's winter-subdued breast. A tea-dance: the cakes pink, the cloths pink, the young men's noses vaguely pink from the walk in the snow from driveway to house—and all of it anthropology, an engine, to put it starkly, for mating according to caste. Even indoors there is a consciousness of the snow. It heightens the spirit, like an incongruously cold liqueur. My mother—Allegra—is perhaps fifteen: a white perpendicular forehead and a white round chin magnificently formed out of snow polished and honed to the clever ice of perfect bone. Compare if you will Stefanie Pettigrew, a rougher sketch of the model, an artist's poor copy of the hanging masterpiece, daringly embellished with up-to-date technique. Is it youth does it? All of youth is beauty if one defines beauty as that which precedes blemish: but blemish is character, and a pretty brow without the scars of character signifies only youth, and not proper beauty, which is banded with marks and acts. This explains Miss Pettigrew, whose impudence the coming decade will have sandpapered into querulousness. Allegra is impudent too, but impudence is not yet a blemish in a child of fifteen. Allegra is subtler than Stefanie perhaps. (We are, you see, laying a swathe through the generations, and setting all the forms of youth side by side, as though they were for the moment immortal. And what a charm it is which allows us to think of Stefanie and Allegra as contemporaries!) You do not agree that Allegra is the slyer one? But already Allegra values freedom. Already her manner is wild. She is just a little more reckless than, in view of her station, she ought to be. And it is not the recklessness of simply lacking judgment, which will, like impudence, wear off into some more sober, or at least commonplace, trait. Not at all. Her recklessness is perhaps her most serious characteristic. She is one of those who have alertness without talent, intelligence without form, energy without a cause. She has come into the world prepared to believe in nobility. Consequently her recklessness will last. If she is disappointed by the betrayal of a dream of nobility—and through what dream of nobility does a traitor not move?—she will avenge the betrayal by further recklessness. Her extraordinary eyes promise swiftnesses.

And William? Very well, William. Visualize William next. He is twenty-five and at the tea-dance given by his mother for his two younger sisters he is everything he should be, though perhaps a trifle timid. Nevertheless he is aware that dynasty must be served. Unlike Allegra, he is naturally religious, hence effortlessly noble. He does not think, as she does, of personal sacrifice, though he is conscious of duty and purity, the latter far more difficult than the former while entirely dependent on it. He supposes that in three or four years, when he and Allegra marry, purity will become a thing to be easily stepped around rather than an aggression against duty. He will of course marry Allegra; it is both right and appropriate, and everyone is very pleasant about it, though no one mentions it. Only what is unsuitable is remarked, and who could be more suitable than Allegra?—if a bit too lively. It is as much a made match as any in India, but this is not the sort of idea that one contemplates for long. William's chief wish at the tea-dance is that he were not quite so afraid of talking to Allegra. He knows he ought to, and more than that, he longs to. She dances by; her quick knees flash their silk at him mockingly. But William is at this time what is generally known as "a poor chuck" in company. This implies a number of matters, all to his credit: for example, it intimates that he is as devout as his mother, whose custom it is to read aloud to her children from her collections of annotated sermons. It also bespeaks a rare wholesomeness. Consider, à propos, the influence upon William of rocks.

In past years William took it into his head that he must become a paleontologist and dig up fossils. At school he was actually secretary of the Fossil Club, which went on Saturday tramps seeking bones. Instead the boys' shovels kicked up the clangor of endless rocks, and the young William prudently wrote in his minutes: "Saturday. A field trip. Chip of mammoth tusk found by Beale, engendering great excitement. Arrive at Natural History Museum just before closing to present mammoth-tusk-chip to curator. Curator has already gone home. Told by guard at door that chip is sea-pebble. Much indignation. Two days later: mammoth-tusk-chip turns out to be sea-pebble of highly interesting formation. S'cy of Club presents brief paper on history of sea-pebbles, is both booed and applauded. S'cy secedes from Club, achieving schism, founds Geology Club with almost one-half of Fossil Club members." This was William's earliest triumph of deflection. In later years he was sometimes called, by disappointed lawyers fruitlessly seeking compromise, The Great Deflector. In fact it was his continuing concern with rocks which gave William the revelation that enabled him to become a lawyer at all. In the first months of the Harvard Law School he did not do well. He studied without penetration. Perhaps it was because his father had considered geology an unrefined form of nonsense and explained that it was William's
duty
to go to law school. His mother, on the other hand, had reminded him that to tamper with the stones of the field could scarcely be God's plan for His children.

Thus William: "I have always disliked abstractions. It might be said that I understood the law from the moment I saw that it was real and tangible, as a rock is real and tangible, and that it was about real things, and not about things which stand for something beyond themselves. There is nothing symbolic in the law, I am glad to say. Unfortunately my son has taken a liking to jurisprudence, a murky and unlawyerlike subject. I trust to the influence of the firm to clarify his views. Law is not theory. Law is denatured geology, you might say. A set of facts, like a rock, is derived from the various influences that have acted on it simultaneously in the past. There is no legal situation that cannot profitably be compared to the history of the formation of rock. No legal situation can be said to be more abstract than a rock."

This is direct quotation. (Poor William! I do not mean to satirize him, only to reveal him.) It is from the newspaper text—like the Fossil Club minutes, I found it among the accumulated bundles of my mother's papers: antique, middling-old, and merely stale anomalies folded in with all those beginnings of earnest Ibsen-like plays and poemlets of her "writing period"—the text of a speech William once made before a commencement assembly of a not-very-important evening law school, where all the students were men, not boys; but they tittered like boys over his doubtful remarks about his son. "I trust to the influence of the firm to clarify his views"—William's son was then stuttering sixteen, with Justice Holmes newly in the crook of his arm and ideal notions not yet emptied from his platonic pockets. His son, at any rate, unlike the audience of graduates (who during daylight were grocery clerks and bookkeepers), would not be obliged to comb fat midtown partners' offices for a job, jurisprudential handicap or no; and if
they
(the night-time graduates) had any geological reflections on the law, it was the knowledge that they would have to start from rock-bottom. In this, as well as in the absence of jurisprudence from their lives and studies, they differed from William's young son.

I have already told, however, how William was called upon to speak here and there. He spoke not always brilliantly; but he spoke his mind. It is not that age demolishes shyness, by the way—it is only that power conceals it.

But (to return to that old scene, where the half-child-self of my mother dances in her white dress): confronted with duty, with his sisters, with Allegra, with his own house festooned into strangeness, with mysterious and ritual waltzes, with all those clever little cakes that said "Helen" and "Marie" amid the snow of icing—William could not speak. He supposed he was to speak. Years were to grow her before they married—surely, in between, he should emit a word?

But she spilled out his name, flying by with a blond plump gay little partner who blew her like a flake round and round—"William!" she called—"William!" a, second time, from the hub of her turnings. He felt sober, pale, clumsy; he felt old, old, old. For half a second he wished his height did not aspire to the ceiling, and that he knew how to make her catch up quickly. If the decade's gap between them were shut, he was sure she would not be so slippery. She came by again and was off again, more slippery than ever, and left her ridicule in his ears: "I told Vernon you looked exactly like a pillar of the church standing there, and Vernon said—" She was snatched away. He had to wait for her return before he could know what-Vernon said. "—he said you're not just a pillar, you're a caryatid!" Her chin was lit with laughter—her partner's, who simpered into it.

They came and stood with him, and talked of Shelley. Allegra had written a poem. Vernon said it was as good as Percy Bysshe's—"symbolic images," he explained. Vernon was the protégé of a certain headmaster. Put it boldly: he was a teacher. It shocked his father, who was the grandson of a merchant, and did nothing himself, though now and then he put on his suspenders and went to a board meeting. Meanwhile Allegra, very serious (and who could be graver than the laughing Allegra?), darted: from poetry to philosophy. She liked Vernon; Vernon was a rebel. "I mean to live!" she told him, and gave her back, a lovely wall but still a wall, to William. "I don't mean just see the world, or die in a storm, or have my heart snatched from the pyre, or anything like that. I mean really
live.
" "The Spanish Main is out-of-date," Vernon teased. "No, no, I mean it. You know my father's gone round the world." "Your father's old." "So's the world." "It doesn't count. It only counts to go round the world when you're young." "Oh, I'll do that!" said Allegra. "You know "To A Skylark'?" "Certainly," said Vernon, as though he had written it himself only day before yesterday—"Shelley's or Wordsworth's?" "Well, we're
talking
about Shelley, for goodness' sake. It's
Shelley
we're talking about, isn't it? Anyhow that's how I feel. Just like that, that's what I mean. William wouldn't know what I mean," she threw out with a little mound of mockery bloating her lip. William agonized, knew he should answer, but could not. He supposed it was because
he
was only intellectual, but
she
was clever. Since he could not combat her, he forgave her instead; he told himself she was a child still. Vernon, on the other hand, was not; he was twenty-three. Vernon taught English grammar in a boys' school, however: so it did not matter about Vernon. "William must think skylarks are illegal," Vernon ventured; "perhaps they trespass"—still smarting over her having turned his erudition ("Shelley's or Wordsworth's?") back upon him. "William's coming to work for my father," said the skylark-emulator with sudden practicality. "He's going to have a little brown office all to himself with a picture of an American Bald Eagle in it." Vernon thought this remarkably funny, and patted his vest with hilarity. "Really. That's a bird of a different color. I mean how foul, f-o-w-1. What are you doing now?" "Clerking," William said, his ears blooming like carnations. "In Woolworth's, do you mean?" "Stupid," said Allegra, "for a judge. It means he doesn't do anything. He climbs out from behind his desk and says just-a-minute-please to people who've come to bribe the judge." "That's not—" William began. "Yes it is. That's just the way it is. And then you say, 'I'm sorry, but this is Righteous Wednesday. We don't take bribes today.'" "There," said Vernon, "it's a perfectly human fox trot for a change. Come and do it, will you?" "Pooh. I like marches," said Allegra. "Then you like the General." "Not the Attorney General"—sticking her tongue out at William. "I meant General Nuisance. Hurry up, it'll end before we get to the floor." "When I come out it'll be all marches." "Then they'll send you in again, miss." "No, I mean it. I hate this sort of stuff. It'll be marches." "Good heavens," said prissy Vernon, "not the Wedding March too?" and danced away with William's bride.

Afterward William looked up "caryatid" in the dictionary. Until then it had not been part of his vocabulary; thereafter it never left it. He did not really see the joke, but it did not prevent him from marrying her after all, and they honeymooned conventionally, though of course they did not know it. They were the newest honeymooners in the world, and they naturally supposed the business that occupied them had begun only with themselves. Cape Ann in September was agreeably deserted. They sat side by side in the shade of a rock (William identified it as calcareous) and Allegra read aloud, rather more brightly than William cared for; he was secretly bored by her favorites—they had been her favorites so long—and she read with a kind of abandon that puzzled and even shocked him. Why did her voice travel up and down so unashamedly? It was as though she sang without music. One sang only in church, and then there was an organ to keep one from making a fool of oneself. But he did not think he would be going to church as often as before; Allegra hated it, and called herself an atheist. Of course she was not. He would not have been permitted to marry an atheist. In the crescent of noon-twilight below the rock he heard his young wife's ardent soaring:

"Like an unbodied joy whose race is
just begun"

—self-captivated.

It had a noble sound, but he fell asleep; beneath them the sand was warm as a cradle. And then quickly he awoke: his young wife stood barefoot in the margins of the sea. A fan of little bubbles was shutting itself not far beyond/her encircled ankles. She had thrown her Shelley in the water, and was watching him drown. "You drifted off, you know," she told the husband; long years afterward he remembered how her mildness at that moment deceived him. He scarcely knew it was the bitterest accusation of her life. "But it was the only book you brought along," he protested, now that it was sinking. "It's all right. I've just decided I hate poetry anyhow." "Fantasy has a limited usefulness in our lives," he assented in his gentle but decisive way; it was his thirtieth birthday. Then he stretched over the water for her hand and led her plashing out. She sat in the sand and drew on her white socks and shivered. In their room she lay staring with her head turned from him—she pretended to search for the lighthouse that was the most elusive note in the view. "Turn," he said. "Dear, I want your face. Turn to me. Turn." But she could not. He supposed it was some impulse of her innocence. The race had just begun, but his joy remained unbodied. She let him perform the duty which permits a man to step around purity in order not to soil it. But she could not give her face.