Trust (54 page)

"Twist, twist! Nick hasn't asked for a penny, whatever you think."

He conceded with a frown. "Rasputins don't ask. It's not their method. They prefer you to ask them."

"Ask them what?" said Allegra. But she was too impatient to pretend reasonableness; she thought him literal; she thought him stupid; she preferred the advance of her story to his qualifications and digressions. "Never mind. You weren't there and you didn't see. Anyhow it was delicious; a victory: in jumps Hugh, and makes Nick admit he'd have to move in with the rest of us if he was really serious about being Rasputin. And you know what Enoch said after that? He said Hugh had pulled off a literary coup, because Omar Khayyam had met his Fitzgerald at last, though of course the analogy wasn't exact—So then I absolutely kissed him, out of gratitude."

"Hum," said William, figuring it out. "Kissed Enoch?"

"Can you imagine anybody's kissing
Enoch?
"

"Kissed Nick," he ventured then.

"Kissed Hugh!
He's
the one who persuaded Nick to stay, after all. And people don't go around kissing Rasputins. Nobody ever accused the Czarina of
that,
did they?" she inquired pointedly. "—Oh look, he's white, if you're wondering!—just because they're friends, Hugh and Nick ... You ought to see them together. You ought to see Nick. He has white-watery hair: a
real
blond. And fantastic eyes, oh unbelievable eyes—"

"Then you had better not believe them," William advised, and would hear no more. The rest of the visit was financial. He agreed to release money for the coal delivery; he agreed to see about the bill for the blankets. The voice was the voice of Allegra, but the hand was the hand of the Youth Leader. "If we had a really big refrigerator, you know the kind, a giant one like they have in hotels and restaurants and places like that, we could buy our meat in large quantities at one time, and get it wholesale, and save plenty of money." So he agreed to this too, though it cost the equivalent of half a year's salary which might have been paid to the anxious young ichthyologist with the Armenian name—what a queer complaining letter the fellow had written! He said he was engaged, and spoke as though the marriage depended on the museum's getting started, and on the job. Not on the money simply—and, truth to tell, the money wasn't much—but on the very job itself. William thought of his father-in-law, and marveled how the biology of the sea could so fascinate some men that they valued it as much as marriage, and mixed the nature of one with the nature of the other. Was he himself, then, a deviation among lovers?—he was as ardent as anyone, but he wanted a simple life and a simple wife, and nothing more: all as plain and solid as a stone, and as free of philosophy. Then and there he felt himself an enemy of philosophy; hence of philosophers—hence of the one called Enoch and the one called Nick. He hated them because they theorized; Enoch, at least, theorized; the other perhaps only put it on. And if theory had not magnetized Allegra, she might never have succumbed to Enoch and Nick, that pair of exploiters, vagabonds, nobodies. Or regard it vice-versa: if she had never encountered these two, she might at this moment still be unsurrendered to philosophy. And what he wanted was Allegra without the abomination of her notions; Allegra sans philosophy; Allegra quick with zeal, but over nothing more serious or terrible than a houseplant. He wished she cared for flowers; he had a pretty vision of a pliant little wife who could tend a rock-garden and keep her window-vases filled. Instead she let the nobodies come and ruin her father's arbor. One of the trellises had given way weeks before, and fell into the fire with a wet hiss and the crackle of thorns. An auto-da-fe: they had burned next year's rose-crop on the stake of their ideology; property was a clot of blood to them; it was quite like burning up the future. And she told him it was a bad business, he ought to send the gardener away, because the man was always cross and called them reactionary names and got in their way. Here and in this at last William's tone would not be opposed: "It was your father's idea to keep the ground intact. You can't dig tents into a lawn and expect grass to grow. Your Youth Leader's brought in the deluge, and the gardener's our finger in the dike; the gardener stays," but the gardener quit. She pointed out how foolish it would be to hire another—the grounds were already too far gone: a tractor would be more practicable than a gardener. It no longer mattered to him. The fuel and the blankets and the freezer and the charred vines and the still-unmarried youth continuing to pelt him with frenetic letters (he was threatening to come and agitate for his job to begin) were footnotes to William's greater venture: he had extended a lease which he had no right to grant to begin with. But this time he was aware that she had promised him nothing in return, only what he knew already: that she was flesh. She piled her notebooks into a suitcase, meanwhile quoting something else Hugh had taught her—"Ich kann nicht anders," she said; "that's Martin Luther"—and left him to kick the polar bear's head in isolation. But he too could not have done otherwise; and he had yielded only the winter months, she had not asked for more than the winter months, and what contractor would care or dare to ferry across to an icy isle to plaster up a partition in the middle of the winter? He knew she was flesh; it was the worst assurance she could have given him, Yet it was only until January. Meanwhile he would see about the feasibility of constructing a bridge.

And in February flesh turned to stone: stone beyond the purview of any geology. He went on the ferry to see. There would never be a bridge. There would never be a museum. There would never be a marriage. The girl came, and the doctor her father. The doctor looked around him and said: "Awkward location for an aquarium." The girl would not speak at all. She wrapped the knife very carefully in her handkerchief to take home with her; she had asked the coroner for it. "Irregular," the coroner said, but he gave it to her; only the day before he had drawn it from her lover's neck. William felt curiously obligated about the funeral. He went on the same airplane that carried the body, and was astonished at the emotionalism of the burial service. There were Armenians everywhere, they swarmed around the grave, dark fused eyebrows over angry drowning eyes. The parents took him to their restaurant and gave him dinner. The father said his son had tried to overreach himself. It was education that had killed him. It was the doctor who had killed him. He ought to have stayed with his own people, in his own people's business. It was the museum that had killed him, and the museum did not even exist. Her recurrent weeping made the mother's English indistinguishable.' "You don't have a son," William thought he heard her say; her accent was a deformity. He was glad to take the train for home; Allegra was there now. The boy's death had scattered the camp, and it was still twelve weeks before the Moscow March For A Better Future. It was a year since she had sat on the polar bear and declared herself to be mankind. It was a year since he had known for himself that she was flesh. She had arrived at Chapter Eight. She occupied herself with writing.

"And then?" I said to William.

"And then nothing."

He made a curious gesture. I had seen him do it several times as he spoke: he brought his fist upon his heart. It was curious, it was primitive; I half expected him to beat with it there. Instead the raised hand came down to the desk again, where it lay, apparently not penitential, but separated from whatever will drove it.

"In May," he said, "she went to Moscow. A boatload of them went, not nearly so great a crew as they had hoped for, however. The ship-fare stopped them."

"And the time in between?"

"Insignificant. Quarrels and so forth. She scarcely left the house, I might say. —None of it concerns you in the least."

"No. And Moscow?"

"Oh, a vast mess and fuss, everything in the newspapers of course. —I don't doubt your mother's still got the clippings. I used to mail bits of the
Times
to her, all hideous. I did it because she asked me to. The whole affair impossible. Insane and subhuman. It can't be adequately told. A streetfight once—the Scandinavian contingent against the South Americans: everybody drunk on all sides. That was Moscow. —And parades. Right out of the trains and into the parades."

"I didn't know my mother knew him in Moscow. Enoch, I mean. —When the fact is she knew him longer ago than that. She knew him far, far back." I absorbed this. "She traveled with him?"

"With him and the other fellow. Greek ship, the
Croesus.
The other fellow was seasick all the way. The Negro was with him as usual. Also a decent little chap, couple of years behind me at school, good family, name of Sparrs. I don't know how he got himself mixed up with them. There was a pack of very foolish girls, as I recall. How many fares she paid I never found out, though I wrote the checks myself. —The upshot of it," he grimly provided, grinding my questions out of the atmosphere, "was that she never came back. Not as my wife. Right after the Moscow thing she went off with him. She went off with him."

"With Enoch," I concluded, thinking he meant to another Rally somewhere.

William coldly looked the other way. "No."

"With Tilbeck?—Ah," I said.

"At last," he blew out, scorning the slowness of my comprehension. But I was slow because
he
was strange. "The pair of them together. Not that I guessed it at first. There were so many parades in so many cities. At every point I had letters explaining the necessity and importance of each. One was for establishing one thing, another for abolishing another thing. Sometimes they abolished in one parade what they had just established in the previous parade." I wondered whether this was a sort of angry joke, but his voice pealed disgust, and was not indulgent, so I followed the stern entrapping fold of his spacious brow in puzzlement: it could not be said that he suffered. There was in his manner the modest shiver of self-gratulation that always accompanies ritual disapproval. "It was the words she loved," he continued. "Reform. Advancement. Equal Distribution. Their mythos."

"But all the while she was with Tilbeck."

"Don't suppose he was to be distinguished from the words. He had other words. He was a cult in himself."

"The cult of art," I said, "the cult of experience."

"Neither," William corrected. "The cult of the cheat. They went to Petrograd. They went to Stockholm. I wrote. She wrote. She wasn't ready to come home, oh not in the least. I wrote. She wrote. Then she gave the reason: Europe was better for finishing the novel, she had to stay until it was done. That meant Nick, so I did the only feasible thing."

I was hopeful he would say what the only feasible thing was.

"I ceased' to write," he announced.

"Did she?" But he had disappointed me.

"Letters in flocks. Bundles of them. Long long letters. Oh, they gave themselves airs. Travel letters. She must have assumed they had the sort of literary value which even I might recognize. Genre writing, you see. I imagine I was supposed to save them. She sometimes slipped into a when-these-are-published vein. But I tore them up. They were unanswerable. Unanswerable." He wandered off into meditation, speculation, recrimination. I waited. When he came back to me his speech was altered by a mysterious rheum: "Italy," he said queerly. "They went
à trois
—took the colored boy with them. They went on down to Rome and left him behind in Milan. They went to Switzerland and Norway and Germany, in that order. Well, in Germany it was the New Order, and a row they cooked up, and it turned out they just skipped out of there in time."

"The Nick of time," I said, pleasing myself.

William appeared offended. "In Munich he got hold of a Fascist shirt and put it on, all smeared over with calves' blood. They had gone to a slaughterer's for it, with a bucket."

"You read this in the papers?"

"Oh, better than that. I received the consul's complaint in the mail. She was listed as a provocateur by the Nazis and I was requested to get her out for her own safety."

"A protest against the regime it was," I surmised.

"On his part? It was the most scandalous act he could conceive of in that place, so he did it"

I examined this. "And all the time she kept writing you, and you never replied."

"I don't say I wasn't sending her checks as she requested them," he informed me. His eye sharpened abruptly. "I wouldn't permit any other arrangement. I admit to that When she was out of money she had to ask for more. I considered myself financially responsible for her."

"As trustee," I gave out.

"As husband."

"She hates not having her letters answered," I said, marveling how with these two liturgically parallel phrases, trustee and husband, these opposites of lawchamber and bedchamber, we mirrored our talk's beginning—though, as in a glass, our mouths stood pertinently reversed: where earlier, claimed as the husband of my mother, William had enjoined me to seek my stepfather for that place, now with the stroke of my stepfather's name I brought it to him that his old rights, even his negligences and omissions, had been usurped. "Enoch never answers her letters, and she hates it. He doesn't answer anything except emergencies. He never even answers her cables."

"Ah, but your mother is prolific with those," William said.

I agreed it was her habit to send a great many cables.

"I meant emergencies," William said. "She has always been prolific with emergencies."

"She likes excitement."

"She likes crisis. She likes it well enough to fabricate it She learned how long ago."

"She doesn't fabricate," I objected, more defensive than convinced.

"She doesn't need to any more. I'm afraid the crises are all thoroughly genuine now. Your poor mother," he said; it was a figure that succeeded with him. "She used to run after mirages of agitation. You see they made these things up. They made them up."

"The crises? The emergencies?"

"In those days," he assured me spitefully, "there was no evil in the world that they didn't make up."