Trust (73 page)

"There's nothing funny in that," I said with gravity.

Desperately he emptied a cyclone from his lung. "It's not the part about missing that's humorous. You're not missing any more. I mean you're
here.
"

I acknowledged I was where I was; it was the least I could do to relieve him.

He was not relieved. "Sonny said you're a link because my father said something that sounded almost like that."

"Sounded like a link?"

He assented with a kind of shamefacedness. "What a link
does,
" he explained.

"Let's see," I said. "It's a shipboard game, is that it? All right. A link does what?"—I considered. "What does a link
usually
do? A link connects. All right? Is that it?"

"It's what you are," he miserably repeated.

"Dense is what I am," I said. "A link connects, whatever you want to say about it. I'm not a connection?"

"No."

"Well, that's where you're wrong. A connection is a relative. I
told
you daughter. So did Tilbeck."

"It's not the way my father said it."

"Oh, your father! Isn't he simply expecting a Neanderthal dressed in dinosaur teeth if he said missing link—"

"
Sonny
said missing link."

"Then what did your father say?"

He sighed until the whole Purse of him swelled; he blurted air, and in the air a word like the chug of a far-away locomotive. "Attachment he said."

I took it alertly: "Is that it? What you couldn't say?"

"It's what you are," he brought out in vindication. Then: "Well I
said
it."

This left me meek though pugnacious. "That's it really? It's what they think?"

"It's why they can't wait to see you. Foxy said it's like a Bible story—"

"You never heard of the Scopes trial," I halted him. "There aren't any missing links in the Bible."

"—like when King David was old and cold and they wanted to warm him up in his bed—"

"Oh,
that
story. And your mother and father too? They think I'm coming for that? They're convinced?"

"They don't
blame
you. I told you."

"You told me," I agreed. But the Purses' false coinage rang out against reality with a stroke euphoric, frenetic, lunatic, marveling, credulous, mad—I laughed, in short. "Because they're liberal!"

"Because they think you must be doing it for the money," he improved it.

"Then they're not Purse-spicacious after all," I said with satisfaction. "Unless Tilbeck's old and cold like King David?"

But he was undeflected. "He
isn't
paying you to come?"

"I came of my own free will. Because he wanted me to. So then
I
wanted to."

This made him blow out hard on his working fists. "I suppose that makes it worse."

"If I came because he was paying me would that make it better?"

"My father says the wilful deed is repugnant to the Lord, but if you do something for money you're not doing it wilfully, you're doing it for a perfectly sound reason."

"Your father is wonderful," I said. "Your father is a casuist."

"Paleontologist," he absently rectified, and set his spine for the final lap: the water blossomed from the oar's penetration like enormous dissolving lettuces, or the labyrinths of the human ear. "We
had
the Scopes trial," he protested. "In Community Civics.—See that lady with all the motors? On the beach? That's my mother. In a million years you wouldn't guess what she's doing right now."

"Yes I would. Punning.
She's
wonderful too," I said.

"She's an ex-prodigy," he confided. "Didn't I tell you she invents things? She likes to say this joke about how she's only im-Purse-onating Benjamin Franklin or somebody. She's very mechanical."

"Ah, she takes after her jokes"—
sotto voce.

"She made Mr. Tilbeck drag out all these old motors that were in this sort of shed—it used to be a boathouse. It's left over from long ago when there were lots of launches going back and forth all the time. Mr. Tilbeck found sixteen motors in there. Most of them are all rusted together. They look pretty hopeless, but my mother's been fooling with them all afternoon. She said she's going to produce at least one working motor before the day is over."

"Suppose she produces something else? Accidentally invents an unexpected machine out of old parts?" I speculated. "Think what a robot Purse would be like!"

He construed this as the kindliest flattery and matched it: "Well, just on account of her being so handy with the motors Mr. Tilbeck said she was an inspiring resource. And my mother said what Purse isn't."

"Never mind," I gave in. "There already
exists
a robot Purse."

"You mean the way I handle myself?" he eagerly put it to me; "I told you I'm fast!"—but my allusion was merely to Mrs. Purse's Pavlovian responses; the reticule of her repartee was truly bottomless: how rich she was in pertinent riposte; how she had for every line an overwhelming answering line—indeed how well-lined a Purse was she! "In fact," said my oarsman, distracting me, "if they had a prize for such a thing, I bet I could row against a motor-boat and win hands down."

"And palm up for the money," I reflected, accusing him: "Spendthrift you are—in self-assertion and self-praise. Behavior unbecoming a Purse. Your father would moralize about it if he heard. Your mother would Purse her lips with displeasure at braggadocio per se. P-u-r-s-e say," I enunciated.

He listened—or did not listen—as soberly as a congregation. "You won't let them know, will you? What I said?"

"Trust me. Upon my word as a coxswain."

Nevertheless he lifted a worried mouth. "—Because they don't want to let on about any of it. They told us"—but did not this spurt of anxiety seem out of proportion to the mere sin of bragging?—"we ought to treat you with the respect a daughter of a benefactor would deserve."

"Daughters again? Is that what you're talking about?"

"You won't say I said it to you?"

"I won't say you boasted. A boasting Purse is an empty Purse."

"I don't mean about rowing fast, who cares about that? I mean what I
said
"—exasperated. "About you. They don't want to let on about you," he insisted.

"I don't want to let on about me either."

"Then do it the way you started to."

"Establish the connection without reference to any attachment?"—sly.

"Stick to being his daughter and leave it at that." This un-boyish directive came in puffs between pulls; it was not the homiletic Purse that spoke in him then, but the one who knew how to accede to circumstance, how to follow like a gleaner to catch possibility. He gulped air with an athlete's rhythmic thirst for it, and the little voids that this violence made gap in the metrics of his words forced devious hesitations into my understanding, so that he seemed not merely hot like a child, but more, an evasive witness before a committee confident it has uncovered a spy. "Besides," he panted into spume, "
we
don't care. My mother said the Purses would be pound-foolish-penny-wise if we walked out on Mr. Tilbeck just to show we had a moral sense. Mr. Tilbeck's going to get my mother this very expensive drill she's always wanted, with about twenty different kinds of fancy bits. He's going to get my father this whole terrific fourteen-volume set of
Evidences of Lateral Femur Development in the North European and Sinaic Mastadon
—it costs over a hundred dollars, and three of those books are nothing but Bibliography and Index. My father says he's always aspired to owning that set and inscribing a motto in it, for inspiration—Perstare et Praestare. It's really the motto of his university, but my mother says it will do nicely for us in particular if we think of it as P-u-r-s-e-stare et P-r-i-c-e-stare. So you see it doesn't matter
what
you are. Not to liberals and humorists it doesn't My father said Mr. Tilbeck's visitors are between Mr. Tilbeck and the Lord."

"Is that a comfortable place to be?" I wondered—"between Tilbeck and the Lord?" and meditated on that limbo place; my birthplace, in fact, where Allegra Vand, presumptive Ambassador's Lady and erstwhile attachment, had discovered herself long ago; and in that place—between Tilbeck and the Lord—was abandoned by both. Thereafter my mother never again knew love or religion. There is a way to know both, and simultaneously—let self-love be one's religion. But never again-did my mother love a man or adore a philosophy. If now she had a religion, it was Enoch, or else (should religion, in the modern manner, demand definition as infatuation with process rather than object) Enoch's advancement; but one cannot love a man who in one form or another constitutes one's whole piety. Nor could she love herself. Who can love bank or bursary? Perhaps one of those pathological misers with dollar-stuffed mattresses and sleeves bulging with dollars and sewn-up trouser-cuffs ballooning a crackle of dollars can; but my mother was prodigal and wastrel, and what she spent she loathed. She loathed herself: universal bank and leaking bursary, leaking leaking cash, purse to Purses by virtue of (but the connections of history are long, are tedious though synapse-like: leave cause and effect to Aristotle and Tolstoy)—by virtue of having hung a garland of red berries on the twig of a tree in Brighton. Hence, by logical and presently effective links, these schnorrer Purses. Hence, by a final causal snap (as of a purse clicking shut), their imputing to me my mother's old role and crime of attachment—as though I were a schnorrer after a connection I had never committed, but which had nevertheless spitefully committed me to life. But all the same, and by the same logic of ultimate causes, as if the primaeval atom had schemed it I came to that place as daughter, and meant to see in Tilbeck not my mother's lover, and not the germinator of my being, and not bank or bursary of sperm, and not trickster, blackmailer, beachcomber, fraud, and not parasite and schnorrer upon whom sub-parasites and sub-schnorrers fattened, and not a pocket for Purses to pick, and not incubus and appetite upon my mother's secretions (her money-perspiration, her money-excretion, her money-exhalation, her money-sneeze, the money-wax that appeared in her ears overnight, the money-cakes in the corners of her eyes when she woke, the morning money-coating on her tongue, her money-belch, her money-fever affecting various thermometers, her money-bile and money-acids, the pits of her money-pox)—nothing I knew I purposed to see in Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: but the one condition unimaginable. I meant to try him out—oh, in the ordinary way!—as father. Oh, in the ordinary way! I thought—supposing he did not have yellow spoiled teeth and the graininess of the knock-about and vagabond, and even supposing he did—I thought plainly I would kiss him. Oh, in the ordinary way! For often I had seen daughters kiss their fathers.

But we were already bounding dog-like for the Purses' benefactor's beach, that sliver of my initiation into daughterness—and in the shallows, look, hymning out in unison a pulse of alien sound, the little Purses were noisily pullulating around us, as though a very large bag had suddenly spawned.

They were counting in Urdu—all but Mohandas K. Gandhi Purse, who held a tiny blue shovel and dug, dug, dug.

Behold the woman who kneels on the beach. Distance, abetted by H
₂
O (this formula signifying, we are romantically told, the elemental mother-fluid of our planet's life-germ)—had sentimentally cast her as the First Woman. But then
we
were bobbing, and
she
was remote. Now nearness and dryness convert the portrait. More sinister or less? How does one reckon Eve, who produced self-conscious lust, beside Circe, who rewarded it? And did her children frolic on the beach the moment after Circe changed Odysseus' crew into pigs, boars, peccaries, razorbacks, wart hogs, swine of every sort and continent? Homer does not tell whether that magical lady was a mother. And yet why not? No mention of Cain and Abel occurs until
after
their progenitrix (and ours) sinned with that unholy apple; and presumably those rivalrous siblings were not yet born while their parents were innocent; that indeed is the point of the story. The connection between Evil and the birth of the next generation is intimate. Evil must have a means wherewith to perpetuate itself, else it would not be hourly earning its notoriety for everlastingness. That is why children are created ubiquitously and eagerly—so that there may always be fresh skins for Evil to dress itself in. It is logical, then, to think of wicked Circe as material and loveful to a herd of little girls and boys, all her own, each one begotten by a visiting sailor before his human snout lengthened, at a thought from that wizard beauty, into piggish muzzle. —Therefore the capering of that company of Purselets did not contradict the possibility that Mrs. Purse was Circe modernized, extemporized, and finally mechanized, which was the image that pressed itself on me while I shook her oil-slimed hand—she laid down an ogre of a wrench to effect this greeting—and heard her explain that
all
the Purses were learning how to count their Pakistani pennies, that Urdu was the language of the place they were going to spend their Ford in ("Purses
can
be af-Forded, they're not clothed in alligator," she put it mystically but beamingly), and that the best way to make linguists out of Purses was to begin with them while they were very young—"while they're still only wallets, you see," she said, and actually horribly winked.

She was surrounded by the victims of her spells: unlucky mariners or just ordinary visitors who had been cast up on that island to be lured by her and then to be changed into something appropriate to the age. And she was too skilled and too practical for sties or stockyards; or perhaps disliked the odor of pork; or was perhaps vegetarian and a hater of the animal kingdom; or perhaps believed herself to be an aesthete, hence quite naturally anti-pig. Whatever her motivation, metal came to her as to a magnet: metal metal everywhere. Her enchanted prisoners, transmogrified, ironized and then oxidized, nutted and bolted and riveted, lay scattered in the sand: this one turned into a starter-battery, that one into a fuel tank, and behind her a whole navy bewitched into ignitions, levers, gear-shifts; here at her right one doomed fellow
finds himself a lowly gasket, and there at her left some great hearty chap is reduced to a poor little piston; and here a rod, and there a ring, a cylinder, a muffler; clutches, shear-pins, propellers, carburetors—they sprawl like so many limbs and souls. And Circe plays with them all with a kind of tactile healthiness, as though she handles important fragments of men; their hideous old rust ruddies her hands so that they seem just now lifted out of entrails newly-opened and dripping automatic oils. And me she considers with an easy, welcoming, assessing, trifling, and barely puzzled smile—the look with which no doubt she confronts everyone, wondering what variety of machine-part the newcomer might best make. In a flash I felt myself fitted out—a screw-thread here, a nozzle there: she had without hesitation refurbished me as that Attachment I had been warned of. She was ready to hook me up to anything. "
Such
a racket," she began, all apology for her children—"they have these terrible tongues, every one of them. And Throw's the worst. Did he talk your ear-off coming? I tell him he has
such
a tongue people will take him for a shoe instead of a Purse. He won't like that, you know! He'll have to go around in laces!" she admonished, gleaming away at me, her wrench restored to her grasp, her wrist experimentally twisting in air, pondering what corner of my apparatus might most readily respond to tightening. "Now look here, Dee, stick to your digging and keep out of my tool-box! The superfluousness of certain Purses!"—giving me to understand that one good hardy screwdriver was worth more than ten Mohandas K. Gandhis, and that the animating impulse of this last Purse of all (breathing, climbing, scrambling) had come about perhaps through a mechanical oversight, an accident of the assembly-line, a case of over-supply in a region where demand was already fully satisfied. Her tool-box, I observed, was deep enough and wide enough and generally spacious enough to swallow a small Purse, and even, for that matter, a quite large one; and there was Dee, with cheeks afloat around his nose like swelled rubber bladders, straining over the brink of that portable machine-shop to exchange his toy spade for a clever wire-cutter. "Well you see," Mrs. Purse explained, following my eyes (as if she thought they needed a slight rotary adjustment), "they don't have anything like our standard of living in those heathen places, you know that. We're not going unequipped! It may be a wrench for us to leave America, but we aren't leaving America without a wrench," and threatened the last Purse of all with that self-same implement. By now the Urdu-counters, having arrived at their limit (I later received it that they could go up to eleven, which, reckoned in Mrs. Purse's cents, seemed a natural block to extravagance), had encircled us altogether, and stood among the enchanted machinery like a set of pale gnomes. And if those captive sailors retained within their steel marrows some shade of human consciousness (as Circe's swine kept theirs), how that heap of complex hardware must have trembled at such paleness! It was the paleness (the sailors had known it in their fathers, and mothers, and that is why they ran off to sea in the first place) of perfect priggery—the paleness of the justice who has spoken unappealable condemnation, the paleness of the new priest who has taken the unalterable vow of celibacy, the paleness of the sober saloon-keeper, the paleness of children who have learned too much and suspect even more than they have learned. Mrs. Purse, it remains to be said, was also pale, and that was very curious, because I had stubbornly imagined (on the principle that all humorists share a standardized clown's jaw) that she would resemble dark bony crane-like Mrs. Karp; but no, she had her own way and her own paleness and lightness, different from the lightness of her progeny—she was big and blonde, the blonde, when you came close, already half-white, and she was ample and buxom and plump and laughing and very young-looking, and she had the sort of smile which shows gums over short teeth located much lower in the face than they ought properly to be expected. She did not in the least remind me of Mrs. Karp, but the sailor-souls in their cold capsules at once disputed my surprise. "You are in error, of course they are alike," said those spellbound mariners in their cages and cells, "most people are more alike than they are generally rumored to be," said those magicked beings locked up in their bits of outboard motor-parts, "take
us
if you want an example! The uniqueness of the individual is one of your benevolent democratic lies. Take us! Take us for uniformity! The characteristics of mankind," said the ignitions, "run in schools," said the starters, "and the true races in men are shown," said the cylinders, "not by the amount of kink in the hair," said the piston who had once been a great hearty chap, "or by the length of the head as measured by an ethnologist's callipers," said the rod and the ring, "but rather by the undeniable evidence that there are biological nations of prigs, and of wags, and of fools," said the shear-pins and the propellers, "miscegenation among whom produces monstrosities of prig-fools, or wag-fools, or, worse yet, prig-wags, polluting," said the lowly gasket, "the purity of the original strain," said all the bits of motors together; they had the unanimity of steel, and glinted on the sand where they lay dispersed, imprisoned and full of hatred for the paleness of the Purselets' perfect priggery. "Purse won't like that," Harriet Beecher meanwhile cried—"better not let him hear you say it," with an ear to Throw, who was bloating himself with confidences, telling how well he had rowed, how fast, how he had rowed me there like a shot, how they had me now plain and clear for inspection. They inspected me, all very pale, Throw among the palest, Foxy deadliest-pale, Sonny and Manny and Al sufficiently pale to frighten the sailors hidden inside their utilitarian tombs. "She did it," Manny told Throw. "Ten minutes ago she did it," Al told Throw. "Got it to work," Sonny told Throw, "but Mr. T. was bored watching so he went up the hill with Purse." "What for?" Throw asked. "To get on with the game, you stupid," said Harriet Beecher under her pale bangs. "Cut a wire, cut a wire," Dee sang out just then, pounding a rusted carburetor with his tiny spade. (The carburetor was actually an old sea-salt with one eye, famed for having once eaten human flesh. He would have eaten Dee if he had not been metalicized.) "I'm a terrible cannibal," Mrs. Purse opened, "you see we had this one
sound,
motor to begin with, and a terrible sound it made, ailing you see, so I cannibalized all these pitiful old things for bits and pieces and now it's all right, though they
did
resist with a fury. Rust fuses and thereby refuses. The thing won't last forever, but it's all right until the new one that's on order comes—it's all a makeshift, I admit, but poor Mr. Tilbeck—Manny, don't you dare call him T to his face, at least not T
square
to his face" (here she paused for Ralph Waldo Emerson's titter), "he'll think you're a little savage, and that's just what you are—
poor
Mr. T. doesn't know one end of a brace and bit from the other, he thought
oil
was the trouble, the lovely man. I suppose oil is more literary, that's why.
Lovely
man, you know the children are all so attached to him, I suppose you are too," she ended, and sprang up from her knees to look me over levelly, letting the hammer of her scrutiny decide what hook or catch in me would best suit for purposes of Attachment She was speedily satisfied. "Throw"—commanding—"you
are
lazy, take that luggage, won't you? You'll likely never again carry anything so fancy—Purses aren't up to alligator, and if we don't get up the hill soon well be eating past sunset and in the pitch and with mosquitoes in the cheese. —It's very primitive here, it's all a ruin and heartbreaking to see the waste, but we find it thrifty, I suppose Throw told you? My goodness, that's
genuine
alligator, isn't it, it's certainly not plastic? Purses are nothing if not plastic," she marveled, "very flexible to adjust to different standards of living," and reached a tool-hardened finger to feel my traveling bag. "But that must have been very expensive! Mr. T.'s responsible for that, isn't he?"