Trust (68 page)

And Enoch said: "Whose lifetime? Yours? Not yours. Think, allow yourself to think."

"Still, still, after so long keeping it down, we kept it down so long, it doesn't make sense why now—"

"If not now, when?" my stepfather said at the end of it.

My mother raised herself. She was ugly. Her lids were fat as lips. She was silent.

"He would have told her all the same," Enoch said.

"Nick? Nick you mean?" she wondered, straining to chirp at him: "That's who you mean?"

"Probably it's why he wants her. To give it to her in his own way."

My mother brought up a single sound without meaning; she kneeled lower and straightened her ankle so that a nervous snap clicked in it. "Ah, but it's terrible now. To send her knowing," she croaked from the mattress-heart, "it's criminal to send her knowing."

"Criminal," he mocked, "to send a daughter to a father?"

"It's not just a daughter to a father any more. It's sending her
knowing.
Look, go ahead and simplify, the more you simplify the more complex you make everything."

"I am not without my gifts," he wearily agreed.

"Sending to a father is one thing, when you send that way it's all right; but now it's sending to a crook, just like that, out in the open, nothing to cover it up," my mother pursued, "it's exactly like making her into an accomplice—"

"To whom?" he challenged.

She suppressed her answer under a fragmentary whine.

"If you mean to us—" But he did not finish; instead he threw out at her dangerously, "Well then
don't
send her."

My mother looked at me with what I recognized as a new timidity.

"I'm going all the same," I said.

"Ah," she pronounced, and took in Enoch with pursy violated eyes. "There, hear that? She wants to, hear that? There, she wants to, for your sake."

"For his sake," I said, crafty to mislead her.

"You see, Enoch, for your sake," my mother repeated.

"No: for Nick's sake," I amended. "He's the one that wants me."

"Oh, he wants you, all right," my mother said, snuffing up a spasm of breath. "It's perfectly plain he
wants
you. Only don't get the idea it's all for your own sake—"

"For
God's
sake," Enoch objected, slapping his hands to his temples.

"But you see? I
said
accomplice. Twitch an eye and isn't she ready to join up in a minute on the other side? Sweetheart," she parried, "he's a
crook.
He always
was
a crook. Look how he's threatening Enoch—you know about this business don't you? I mean now you understand all about it, right?"

"Maybe he does it just to get me. Nobody ever let him get near me any other way, so maybe he does it just to get me. Because he wants me," I said again.

"Idiot. He doesn't want
you,
it's me he wants to get at. He wants trouble. Well look, what he really wants is revenge," she stated, "on me, don't think I'm going to be
obtuse
about it He thinks he has plenty to get even with, that's why. —That time in Europe."

"What time?" Enoch said.

"The whole time. The whole time he was in Europe. The whole war I mean."

"Sure. You made the war just to spite him."

"Well indirectly we all did, that's
your
idea, isn't it? To spite ourselves. Humankind brutalizing itself. So I suppose I was in on it too. Don't ridicule, he's never forgotten and never forgiven, you
know
that." She scrambled herself erect and confronted us with her mouth pointed into a deliberate argument of openness, like a trapezoid. "I came safe home myself, that's why, and never got him out of there, and ever since what's it been but a simple case of getting even? That's all he's after. It was a simple question of, of"—she swiveled quickly to shatter Enoch with her high ruined declarative—"abandonment. Say what you want, it's true, that's just what it was, abandonment Nothing else. Because I left him there."

"You left him there," Enoch admitted.

"Well it's true, go ahead, try to deny it. There I was safe in America and there
he
was God knows where."

"Sure," Enoch said. "Nobody denies that."

"And I don't feel bad about it even one little bit. I would do it all over again, the same way if I had to. The point is"—she fixed on me, daring me to be indifferent—"well the whole
point
is I could have got him out of there if I tried harder, well not
just
me, but this bank I had dealings with at that time and William didn't lift a finger either ... not that that's why I decided to abandon him though. He was a crook, out and out. He wasn't
worth
getting out of there. —You remember Anna? That girl we had for you when you were little? When I marched you over there right after the war?"

"Anneke," I said, distracted that she should suppose impermanence in me of a vividness of fear.

"That's the one, you always did do her name with a good accent—she practically made a foreigner out of you anyhow, the way you picked up the language over there. Of course you were
born
on that side of the water, that probably has something to do with it. You remember we sent her away? He was pumping her for information, naturally at that age you wouldn't realize that. Once a crook always a crook, that's the point, you follow? He came right up to us and right out with it and asked for money, that's the calibre he is, you follow? Well I
knew
all that, practically from the beginning. He didn't make a fool out of
me,
maybe out of plenty of others, but not out of me. Out of the blue I went home and left him. Pure and simple out of the blue. He never knew what hit him, you see what I mean. You don't get over a shock of that nature, and ten years later he turns up nearly insane with spite,
not
a normal man by anyone's standards, and asks for money. As far as that girl goes, well that was all vicarious, that's what I mean by not normal. What do you call it again? Enoch? In psychology?"

He waited with nostrils shrewd and stretched wide. "Call what?"

"Something standing for something else."

"A stand-in."

"That's
movies.
Psychology I want. It's a
term.
"

"Metonomy."

"Is that it? It
sounds
Freudian, but not exactly, I don't know, maybe it's Jungian, is that why? Metamorphosis? Anyhow
she
was working for
me,
so it gave him this feeling that if he influenced
her,
he was getting at me—"

"Ius primae noctis," Enoch said.

"I'm sure that's not it. Look, never mind, will you? It doesn't matter what it's called, it's what happened."

"What happened was you paid him," I said, but she did not hesitate.

"We got rid of him. It was a nice little wish-fulfillment thing he was acting out with that girl, a cheeky type anyhow. I don't know how he worked up an image of me out of
her,
but that's how they do it. There doesn't have to be any moral resemblance, let alone physical. Fetishism. Her attitude was the world owed her a living. We got rid of them both. The only reason I'm telling you this is to show it wasn't the first time I had to get rid of him. The
first
time I just came home. Left him. Look, it's what I just said, plain ordinary abandonment. Maybe he would die in the war, maybe he wouldn't. Naturally he survived. That type always does, they're indestructible. In this world the worst always triumph. I could give ninety-three-thousand examples. I don't say I
wanted
him to die, it was just a bet I had with myself."

"You ought to quit lying," Enoch said.

"I'm not lying. It's a fact, why should I want him to die?"

He ignored this. "After all she's going to him."

"I know that. I know who she's going to."

"Then quit lying to her."

"I'm not lying. You can't contradict one single thing. What happened happened. Now listen. Was it abandonment pure and
simple?
Was he an out-and-out crook from the first
minute?
"

"Allegra."

"Allegra Allegra. Did I run from him the way you rim from a plague? Cholera? Malaria?"

"Allegra," he said. The name, or his voice giving it out in succession, sounded like an object: a table, a book. "You don't save anything this way."

"You think I don't realize? I realize that. What's there to save? How do you think I feel, her getting it like that—the Goddamn bloody way he picked to tell her: that word. I didn't think he'd do it that way. I mean not that
word.
I thought he'd do it with plenty of embroidery,
decent
words at least. I thought he'd do it like a lawyer, damn it."

"Credit him for doing it at all, will you? Don't dream," he said. "If it had been left to Nick—"

"
I
don't know, how should I know how Nick would do it? Maybe better, maybe worse. How do I know how he's going to act with her? What I'm getting at is William at least was supposed to make something fancy and legal out of it, not plunk plunk hello you're a so-and-so. He could have said it in a, well I don't know, a figure of speech."

"There are no figures," he sighed, "of speech."

"Yes there are. Bar sinister, there's one. Hugh taught me that years ago. It was part of a joke once when William came down. To the camp."

Enoch said, "Don't you see you don't change things by changing them in your imagination—"

"He didn't have to say issue either. Illegitimate is bad enough, he didn't have to say issue. It sounds like out of a nineteenth-century hospital where the doctors don't wash their hands. Leeches and things. Sores gushing. A run of bad blood. He doesn't
have
any imagination, he could have done a fancy legal job, never mind this hacksawing."

"It's not William's imagination that's at fault," Enoch said.

"Because he doesn't
have
any, I just told you."

"The most ruthless words are the legal ones," Enoch said, "they have the vice of accuracy."

"Now tell me something new. Tell me about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. You think I don't know that? You think I haven't had any experience with legal words? You take a perfectly
beautiful
word, you give it to a lawyer and it ends up meaning something just the opposite, ugly as sin, oh but
terribly
exact, you have to walk right down the middle of the white line the pirates draw on the gangplank for you. I've had plenty of experience! You'd think if somebody gave you a trust it would mean they trusted you, but what it really means is they
don't,
they think you're deaf and blind and don't know the most obvious things about life."

"Namely," Enoch said barrenly, "that in life nothing is obvious."

"I hate that word."

"Obvious?" he guessed. "Nothing? Life?"

"Oh stop. Imagination. Damn it, what do you think we're talking about? You don't listen to me. You listen for a minute and then you quip and then you don't listen. I
listen
at least. You were just telling me you don't change things if you imagine you're changing them, true?—so then please explain how we happened to give her twelve safe years, you said it yourself, you
said
twelve safe years, and didn't we change things by letting her imagine something that—well, that divorce business, say. It changed things for her, didn't it? It kept her free all that time, right? And the whole thing was imagination, right?"

"Al-
leg
-ra," he enunciated with drained patient tonelessness.

"You want to make me hate my own
name,
Enoch? Say leg like that again and I'll kick you with it."

"Don't feed her fairy tales."

"What fairy tales?
What
fairy tales? He didn't come sucking around that Anneke ten years after? He didn't get stuck for the whole war over there? Look, I don't remember any hordes of lawyers and bankers and ex-Youth Leaders running around in circles trying to find him and get him out, do you?"

"I think," Enoch said, "she should read now."

"Read what? Enoch, you're crazy. What she
should
do is pack," my mother argued. "I've had Janet standing by for days just
for
that, every grip in the house wide open, there's not an article of hers that isn't ironed and ready. She doesn't have to do anything but point a fingernail at what she wants to take, and
that's
too much for her ... as it is she reads more than what any sane person would call normal. Before you got home she was reading newspapers like a fanatic. Mental health columns, everything."

"She should read," he repeated, "history. Here," he told me, "third drawer down, compartment in the back: a little history of Abandonment: cardboard box with foolish stripes all over it, the whole thing holographic and incredibly ancient, you can't miss it," and held up the key to his desk, a short brass bar crowned at one end, club-footed at the other, and, it turned out, body-warm. He had been fondling it inside his pocket all the while.

"What are you up to?" my mother asked; already it was a plaint of denial. "What are you
giving
her?"

"Hell," he answered, a noun, and tossed the key for me to catch; it came winking down near my shoe, attached in flight to its little ring, and displaced in me, even before I bent to take it from the carpet, a ferocious image. "She's entitled to it same as anyone," Enoch said, while I dived and tapped yellow metal teeth: the touch of points restored me to shock, as though this room were that old other room where my mother had locked me into freedom, naked as birth, and really as though this small sweated key from Enoch's hand, tinkling along its ring, could chink out reluctant contemplations—a blue bicycle cradled in a hedge shaped like a duck, able to rattle, doomed to clatter and chime, a belfry of mobile violence, each wheel-hoop a spinning coin great as a gong; and the key itself indistinguishable from that old rusted giant which had lain like an icon in my mother's palm, cold as cash.

So I found her letters, and read them through against the scratch of her long argument, and was soon done with them (having skipped the philosophy parts), and knew as little of Brighton as they gave—my mother meanwhile protesting, declaring she had never seen them in her life before, calling them phony contrivances, calling them forgeries, denying her own handwriting, blaming me for looting, for snooping, for attacking her privacy, for crushing the box, for stealing the key, for misunderstanding her feelings, for being unable to conceive of the nature of Brighton, or the nature of those old early days, or the nature of Nick, or the nature of Enoch, whom, she ended, she could easily have had arrested for burglary.