Trust (67 page)

"Allegra," Enoch said.

"Are you listening to her? Are you listening? Halfway she says!"

"I think it was the whole way."

"What?"

"Take off that idiotic visor, helmet, whatever it is, that piece of stupidity," he commanded her; his gentleness was not protective. He chose not to disclose the sources of his reasoning, yet he continued to reason, and this made him seem dangerous even without provocation. To me he said: "What did you go there for?"

"What do you
think
she went there for?" my mother intervened. "To humiliate herself and grab trouble! Those boys wouldn't
look
at her the first time, and then at least I had her
dressed,
and will you just please observe her now, that awful skirt with
pockets,
all ribbed up like she's been on horseback the whole day in it,
now
she's after those boys! She heard those boys were over there, that's why she went. Those law students, perfectly
acceptable
boys—"

"I didn't go on account of the boys," I said.

"She didn't go on account of the boys," Enoch said. His repetition of this, his tone very simple and in spite of simplicity reverberating with ominousness, brought a glimmer of bewilderment into my mother's mouth; a startled bubble blew itself up at the delta of lips and cheek. "Take off that headgear, will you? You're got up for a duel—I told you before I won't be your second in this, no matter what."

"But we're going out in a minute—" All the same she complied, pulling off the connected segments of her hat like a sausage moulting; meanwhile directed erratic disputations at me. "I don't know why
you're
so complacent, I'll bet you're not even packed properly; leaving tomorrow and disappears the day before and not even packed—"

But here, perhaps because by yielding to my stepfather she showed herself vulnerable, exposed to dread—her scalp obvious in patches through insufficient hair had a piteous spark, like a candle by day—I slid out the thin point of my accusation: "But there wasn't a divorce—"

Her look, coming to take me slow-motion, emptied itself en route. "Oh, is that it? Is that it? What everything's about?"

"Because you were never married," I completed it, and waited to feel the blow I had cast against my own frailty subside.

But she held on; she was all skilful deflection; or else all opacity. "Well we
were
married at first. We had a honeymoon and everything. And just because William likes to keep up a, a
relationship,
it doesn't mean he doesn't feel just as divorced as I do. It's a funny time of the night to want to start a discussion about William," she said, striding off to stand behind Enoch's chair as though the back of his head had answers written on it, which she was even now consulting. "I don't deny it's a
subject,
the way he sort of can't let go, let go of
me
I mean—I suppose you bumped into it over there today? Well look, it doesn't bother me, I'm not the one it really kills, and it's not that we're not on speaking terms either, nothing deliberate like that—I'm talking about Sarah Jean—it's just a kind of accident, really, we simply haven't managed to meet in all these years ... who brought it up?"

"William's son," I said, amazed that her obtuseness—wilful or genuine—should hit on a fact so squarely.

"That boy tries so hard not to be like his father. It's why he's never shown any interest in you: you
represent
me," she brought out: she had a trace of Enoch's manner, half abstraction, half mockery. "Look, do you want something explained? About how a honeymoon stops being a honeymoon? Well I know, I mean it's absurd at
your
age: but Enoch, she's always been backward, not mentally speaking, socially I mean, always since she was little. You'd know that without my saying so if you'd ever paid any attention. —Because if it isn't sex relations you want to hash over, right in the
shank
of the evening, really we ought to get started—"

"Allegra, you're perfectly stupid," said her husband.

"Am I? Am I?" A power entered her voice. "
I'm
willing to talk to her, or haven't you noticed? If I'm so stupid why don't
you
talk to her for a change?"

"It appears not to be necessary," he said mildly.

"Nobody has to talk to me," I said.

"Then what sort of an issue are you trying to raise? Damn it, she disappears the whole day, she barges into somebody's
private
engagement party, she ruins the Soviet Union for me—those gangsters, and then out of the blue she brings up
William and
brings him up
and
up—"

"Nobody has to talk to me."

"Then what in God's name is it all about? What's the
issue?
"

"William said issue," I said.

"What?"

"William said issue. He said issue to me."

"Come to the point, will you?" she directed, loud with anxiety, and dropped her forearms over Enoch's shoulders. They came on him with a roughness, pressing down as though she could smother scorn with the weight of her wrist-bones, hooped gaudily with a twist of bracelets scribbled there like a spring. She had turned her sleevelessness into a foliage of chatter and glister fit for the vermin of photographers, implying racket, implying improbable volitions, implying scandal. "Is there a point here? Come to the point, can't you?"

"He said issue and I said illegitimate issue."

My mother released her hold and jangled her hands fearfully around the paleness of Enoch's intimately-scrolled ears. "What in the name of Christ Jesus is she talking about?"

"Me," I said. "Me me me."

"She's been told," Enoch said.

"I'm talking about me," I said.

"Pig! You you you. That's all you ever think of. Little selfish pig," my mother brought out: she walked round and round her bed.

"Wrong animal," Enoch said. "The plaint to the slaughterer. Though no pig. Ram. The ram demands to know why he, also God's own creature, is less worthy than Isaac. Everybody worries over Isaac, and then the ram substitutes under the knife, and nobody cares. A subject the Commentaries leave unexplored."

"
I
don't leave it unexplored," my mother said raspingly. "Don't give me rams, I'll ram rams down you! I want to hear things in plain English! Who told her what? Nobody told her anything! There's nothing to tell, it's all been kept down—"

"William told her," Enoch said, flattening the atlas from thigh to thigh, like a bridge; over it he flexed his fingers, fisting and stretching. Then with a subtlety: "Are you afraid?"

"Told her what? I'm not afraid. Told her what? You think I'm afraid? I'm not afraid, there's nothing to be afraid' of! Talk!" she ordered me.

"Tell what you've been told," Enoch said.

"It's not news."

"It's news that you've been told."

"What do I care? She knows it already," I protested.

"What what what!" my mother screamed. "Talk!"

"She's brought back a dirty word and that's all there is," Enoch responded; a series of hyphens composed longitudes in his lap.

"Pig! William said something? He didn't say! He didn't! He said something?"

"Allegra."

"He said something!"

"He told her."

"He told her," my mother breathed. Her breath was a dog's breath; it was audible; I discovered myself in shame for its naked audibility; it was audible, it was pitifuL "He told her, Enoch?"

"Somebody had to tell her," Enoch said.

"I know, I know," she murmured, consenting, "I know."

"You delegated it and it was done."

"I didn't delegate it, I only decided with William—"

"The agent performs, the proxy acts. The trustee is surrogate. A case of behalfs adding up to the whole."

"Oh
please
don't start that sort of talk—"

"Myself neither gear nor cog in it, I warned you. When I favored the whole it was cloth I meant, whole truth being partial error, if I may reverse Lord Shaftesbury and Pope." But he was perfectly unsmiling.

"You, you're so detached," she flung out.

"Say it again if you want. Detached."

"Pedantic in a crisis!"

"A, there is no crisis. B, what other crisis behavior do you think plausible?"—and he suddenly began to chant, his big head listing piously:

Don't be pedantic
When in a crisis.
Do be frantic,
For it stimulates your vices.

My mother halted in the middle of her circuit: "Enoch, you joke, you carry on, and meanwhile the whole world's changed—"

"Nothing's changed," he replied soberly.

"Mrs. Karp's better at it," I remarked.

He inquired, "Better at what?"

"Instant rhyming."

"My dear child, I have spent the last twenty years perfecting that verse. The only thing instant about it is your mother's disapproval. Nevertheless after removal of all visible syntax, I intend to submit it to
Bushelbasket
for editorial consideration. Not your mother's—her representative's: following her example, you see, with regard to responsibility."

"Enoch, will you
listen
to me? I did
not
delegate it, I only said if ever some day it had to be dealt with, I mean if it came
up,
if we
had
to, well,
you
wouldn't do it, and so he said, William said, if it happened
he
would. If we
had
to only."

"I recall it. I fail to see the logical 'we' in it. You should have done it yourself."

"It's a problem of law, it's for lawyers."

"I should rather call it a problem of family," he said lazily.

"All right then! Family!" she cried. "You're in it same as anyone if that's the case!"

"Ah, you're a step beyond the actual case," he noted.

"You could have told her yourself. I mean if you think it's so terrible about William doing it. William's nothing to her!"

"
I
am nothing to her."

"You're her stepfather, damn it!"

"Precisely the step too far I had in mind," he bit off.

"Oh, you're cool about it," said my mother, folding her lip in tight upon her teeth, "
nice
and cool, aren't you? You're in it same as anyone! Deny it! You're the one said to pay him off in the first place, deny it! Eleven, twelve years ago, that time we talked the whole thing through, you came out with it right at the beginning—"

"You're missing that money? You're in need of it?"

"You're the one who made me give in to him."

"But we didn't have reasons, did we?
L'acte gratuit
it was. We did it for the love of him."

She stabbed feebly, "Oh stop it, don't say love like that, you're the one who made me."

"And viewing it retroactively, you would have preferred exposure? We didn't have a motivation good enough for Allegra-after-the-fact? You want to forget how we looked at every side and into the future and all around the thing?"

"Well she's pigged up anyway now, so Where's the difference?"

"Twelve safe years is the difference."

"But now she's pigged up anyway."

"I'm not pigged up," I said.

"The hell you're not! I should never have given in to him in the first place. That was the mistake of it. Never give in to a thief." With dull guile she addressed my stepfather: "You're the one who made me give in to him in the first place. It's because I gave in to him."

"You gave in to him," he repeated. He often repeated phrases of hers, but with a conscious change of intonation which turned them sinister, even when he chose, as now vaguely yet too calculatedly he chose, to laugh. "Still," he considered it with the whole clandestine energy of his cleverness, "it depends on exactly which point in history you refer me to. As for our present circumstances, you're perfectly right, they wouldn't have their interest for us now if you hadn't given in to him in the first place. Only," he concluded, all wondering outstretched palms, "was Moscow the first place you gave in to him in? Or before that, the camp? God knows Brighton wasn't the first—"

She spat out at him full and fierce: "Bastard!"—and a jewelled smear of spittle stood upright, webbed over her still open mouth, a flat skin of terrible shining bubble, like a valve.

I did not hesitate. "William's dirty word," I said quickly, to punish her.

But "I didn't mean you"—she took it as undeliberate, as a wicked accident of the feelings, as hideous confessional misappropriation, as every horror—"I didn't, I only meant oh God oh God," she sent out, grinding crescents into the carpet on humped knees, sinking her head into the bedcovers. Her eyes, going down in milky shadow, yielded momentary points of warty light and drowned. "I meant I gave in to
pay
him. I mean that."

I said impatiently, "I know it. You paid him and paid him."

"It was to keep him away."

"I know all that."

"We kept him away, we kept his
name
from you—" She carried her face up for a second's surveillance of mine. Her nostrils appeared briefly to collapse, then muscled out to leak streaming transparencies: "And for this, for this!"

"I know his name. Plenty of names he has," I said.

"For this," she gave out, swallowing deep among sheets. "I thought you'd be free of that, I always meant you to be free, you were supposed to be free," and clanged out a fearful drone: Enoch jumped with alarm.

"The stupidity of this," he urged. "Get up. Don't be a fool, Allegra. Stand
up,
" and stood himself: the atlas flashed down between his legs like a fan or hand of cards, flicking out nations, pink, purple, orange, green, and lavender-blue waters anchored and split by hyphens; suddenly it showed Brazil, brownish, bloblike, supine under the chair, and Enoch leaned and spoke into flesh bunched under one horrified eye: "How stupid you are."

My mother answered with a live tone like a tuning fork. "Oh God oh God oh God," she snaked out with a queer clamor, half noise half voicelessness, "why now, what I want to know is why now, after a lifetime why now?" And then began that wailing, never-to-be-forgotten, which inhabited her for minutes without rest, without insistence but rather as an immanence, as though by right, and therefore curiously tiresome, which in fact I have already described: how she dashed herself upon herself; how she splintered fingernails into tissue; how she bowled bracelets up and down her arms; how her elbows declared themselves to be two idols of fate, knifing air and bed and Enoch; how she played Out her long lung in bawlings that coarsened her speech for a day; how she wept, how she wept, because I knew she had paid and paid, and had never been divorced because never married to that father who had plenty of names but none left over for me: because I knew; and she wept for an hour because I knew. "Why now, why now, just
tell
me, after a lifetime why now..."