Trust (75 page)

I was moved to speak: "You're not fair," I said faintly.

"No? You want to prove it with the upstairs? Elevator cage is nice and dead. Full of stuffed birds anyhow. Two flights up though I can show you a dozen dressing-tables that this damn piano doesn't nearly come up to for filth. Genuine filth. A tourist, I knew it!"

"You call everything filth," I said.

"Why not? This place look better than filth to you?"

"I don't judge places."

"That's nice. Tourist's view—pure. All the picture postcards have the same value. You're a pure one! What do you judge, people?" he demanded.

"History," I said, and thought of Enoch. "Records."

"They tell you to come with that? Look, don't try on masks with me, I see right through them. I might surprise you, I might not be what the high and mighty Mrs. Vand says I am. The high and mighty Mrs. Vand could be one high and mighty fake."

The frightening familiarity of these words shocked me into memory; he had said the same long ago, while I crouched listening on the ledge of Europe. He had come for terms and said these words; it was history I was hearing, and a record emended to eliminate the laugh. He was not laughing now. He stabbed the piano with a finger: down went a black bar, but it was silent. "Don't say high and mighty," I begged.

"Don't say filth, don't say high and mighty! Who are you, girlie? Not a judge, only a general. Tell me," he said, "you don't think I've got my side of things too? That's ail you have to know about people, their side."

"I don't want to take sides—"

"That's right, the disinterested observer. Sit in the center. It so happens that most things can't be seen from the center. You have to go into the thick of one side or the other to get the truth. Nothing's really disinterested but logic, and what's logical isn't what's true, verstehst? There isn't any disinterred truth, there's only partisan truth, comprends? What do you know about your grandfather?" he said suddenly.

I looked with shame at the harps on the ceiling. "He tried to get my mother to live here after she was married. But she wouldn't, she didn't like it."

"So?—That's it?" He waited.

"Well, then he traveled around a lot. Toward the end he got interested in science—sea things. I don't know much else," I faltered: "he died before I was born."

"After you were born."

"No, before—"

"All right, see what I mean? There you are in the center, keeping your mitts nice and clean behind your back, and you don't know a damn thing.
After.
When I tell you after better take it as gospel."

"But it isn't true, my mother had only just married William—"

"Your grandfather was a Swedish longshoreman and he died frozen drunk in the streets of Seattle in 1946. Now tell me different."

I said hesitantly, "Your father, you mean? That's who you mean?"

"Don't try to step back from it that way. Blood is blood. Gustavus Tilbeck. He couldn't read a word of any language on this earth, but he was named after a king and me he named after a king and a czar, so you can see he had the imagination of an aristocrat. Your mother never told you that?"

"No."

"All those lawyers and accountants she has, they never mentioned it?"

"No," I said.

"People like that avoid what's interesting, that's why. Me it strikes as something interesting that the high and mighty Mrs. Vand's girlie is all mixed up with a Swede with the proclivity. I've got the proclivity myself, but I stick to wine. Kings I like too, you've noticed it. Did you know about that, that I was named for a king and a czar?"

"No," I said again.

"Because actually I was named for my father and for a dog he was very fond of in his boyhood. Dog's name was Nick. A wolfhound. My father spent his boyhood on a fine wholesome prosperous farm just outside of Upsala. He was a graduate of the University of Upsala, as a matter of fact."

"But you said he couldn't read—"

But now he gave a long laugh I queerly recognized. "Nobody who graduates from the University of Upsala can read. They don't teach reading there, they teach theology. Old Gus couldn't swallow the Trinity, so he settled down on the docks instead. The reason he picked the Seattle docks is because in Sweden they advertise American opportunity. Well, it's a success story. It hasn't embarrassed you?"

I said: "You're not the way I expected."

"Better, I hope. This is a first-class shirt I'm wearing. Observe the fine stitching. Observe my excellent shoes. Extraordinary knitted socks. Observe the structure of my knees below my fashionable tennis-shorts. Superlatively hinged knees. The entire costume courtesy of the high and mighty Mrs. Vand, clothier by appointment to my humble origins. Except for the knees, which are also gratis, but from another source. God. Now you have it all."

I persisted, "I thought you were older. Enoch's age."

"No, no, I've got a few years on the Ambassador."

"But you must have been very young—"

"You mean you want gossip. Right. I was an absolute boy when I slept with your mother. Does that satisfy? I wasn't of age, I had to write home for permission. My father stirred in the gutter and said Go ahead, my child, which made my mother and sisters weep for a month. Your grandmother and your aunts. All members of the Lutheran Ladies' Aid Society, though one of them gave up tea and converted to Mormonism. My mother always read to my father out of the Sunday supplements and he was shocked at the modern neuroses he learned about that way. That's why he told me to go ahead and pursue the rich. The illiterate are very clean-minded. You're sure I'm not embarrassing you?"

"I think you are," I said.

"Tourists are easily embarrassed, especially by just the thing they've come to see. The scenery isn't antiseptic enough for you, that's the trouble? You don't like the smell of the ruined abbey? You want the reconstructed cinderblock replica with indoor plumbing for visitors?"

"Why do you keep calling me tourist?" I asked.

"You hate a place where you have to do your duty behind a tree? Is that what's embarrassing?"

"No," I said. "It's not knowing what's real and what isn't."

"A philosopher-tourist!" he cried. "You're like your mother in that They're the worst."

"Some of what you say isn't real—"

"—and some is. Brilliant beginning. I put a cinderblock replica and a ruined abbey in everything I say. The ruined abbey is real."

"No it isn't, not if it's kept that way just for show, like a museum—"

"A museum? You've heard of that? They were going to turn
this
place into a museum, you've heard of that?"

"Yes," I said.

"And a man killed himself here."

"I know."

"Briefed. Perfect! Tourist-with-guidebook, knows all principal points of interest beforehand, knows when guide skimps on tour, behaves honorably all the same, tips guide even though he cheats, but vows privately to boycott Rome next time round. I know the type! You think Rome misses you, girlie? All right. On with the tour. What other sights did they tell you to look for especially, hah, tourist?"

"I'm not a tourist," I said.

"The hell you're not. Allegra sent you to look around. The high and mighty Mrs. Vand, an old hand at tourism. Hasn't got the nerve to come and see for herself. Can't look me in the eye. Wants a report. Tell her"—again he laughed his long laugh, a chain of laughs—"tell her I'm finally letting the grass grow under my feet!"

"She didn't send me for that."

"No? Not to get a look at Nick? See if he's comfortable and
all?
Check on his health?"

"No."

"She feels guilty about me, y'see. She owes me a lot"

"She's paid you a lot."

"Aha. Just what I said. I knew there was something else you might mention. A quotation from the fine print—a renowned spire, so to speak, that they've made famous for you back home by keeping a picture of it framed on the wall. Or a picture of the ravens that come to nest in the vine-covered nave of the ruined abbey. So to speak. You've heard of those? You've heard of everything then. You've got a very good guidebook, pictures aside. Who wrote it? The Ambassador himself?—No, no, your mother's a woman of honor, she pays her debts, if she's paid me a lot it's because she's owed me a lot. Right from the start. In her whole life she's done only one thing on her own, and she didn't do
that
on her own. 'Hollow Marianna: The Girls' Own Das Kapital.' Or: "The Double-X: Se- and Mar-.' You think that treatise would've gotten done without me? She'd've had the discipline for that sort of thing? I kept her at it, I made her do it. It's a tutorial fee she's paid me. That's how she ought to look at it It's how
I
look at it. —Getting dark. Around here you need a flashlight. You bring a flashlight?"

I shook my head.

"The Purses know where I keep 'em. Ask the Purses. Meanwhile I'll descend for the bottle. You like port? No, out the other way. Front door, excellent sample of Mixed Renaissance filth. Take you right out to the Purses at prayer. You might be on time to see them pass the plate. Mrs. Purse has soap if you want it—they brought their own—she probably made it out of tallow in a vat. Slaughtered an ox herself to get at the fat. Undoubtedly forged the steel for the knife. Fine woman. If you have to do your duty, pick a tree."

He vanished behind a brown door, and I heard his languid pressure on the stair. I went the way he had pointed, and discovered the Purses ranked palely around the table under a sunset of rose and purple smears, clouds like colored ships, each child with a king's snout in its back. The spit was restored to the flame, and a second fowl dripped its fragrant shine from it like a candle dripping wax. And there was Purse carving away at the bird on the board, delicately—a man who knew his bones and meant to keep them in order. The children sent up a babble. Mrs. Purse looked all around her and smiled and smiled; then she stared at her fork as at a captive. "Oh why won't you all be
quiet,
" she murmured to the air—"it's bad manners to jangle Purses in public," "public" being her salute to me as I came up; one child only responded with a quick shrill howl.

It was an idyll.

The child who laughed was Ralph Waldo Emerson Purse, the humorist; he laughed again when Mrs. Purse, handing round paper platefuls of chicken parts, moved her short teeth and low gums into shadow and observed (this too was for my entertainment)—"We like to keep our Purses well filled, you see." "A thought we've already digested," responded the humorist. "Oh shut up," said Harriet Beecher crossly. "I want a drumstick," said Throw. But Purse said: "You know Dee always has the one, you shouldn't be always claiming the other. That's greed." "It's greed in Dee. He gets one all the time." "Dee is only two, remember that." "Is that why he eats for two?" said Sonny. "It's my turn for the drumstick," Foxy said. "It is not." said Al; "I haven't had one ever." "Liar!" said Throw. "Lyre has nothing to do with it," Sonny said complacently—"all he cares about is lute. He wants to grab the 1-o-o-t." "If you're going to be silly and wrangle—" Purse began. "They don't wrangle, they
jangle,
" said his wife. "—nobody at all will get it," he ended severely, and took a greasy bite of it down to the bone. "There," said Mrs. Purse, banging her fork: "That's what happens to a bone of contention. Nobody at all gets it," and looked at her husband as if she were looking at nobody at all.

The wine having arrived—two bottles sprouting like antennae from under Tilbeck's arms—it was set to swim in the spring.

"You'll have the water in its cups," Mrs. Purse chided brightly.

"Can't I have you the same?" asked her host.

"Ah, but we don't, you know."

"We don't," said Purse with emphasis. "It loosens the will."

"Chacun à son goût. Better the will than the bowels."

Purse frowned terribly. He was jealous of his wife.

"Here's your dinner," said she, holding out a plate to me. "Do you like to hear singing? Mr. Tilbeck has a charming repertory. He sings epigrams. He makes up the tunes."

"He sings Robert Frost," Throw said.

"Sing Robert Frost," Mrs. Purse wheedled.

He sang: "HOW are we to WRITE the Russian NOV-el in America a-a-a-as long as LIFE GOES on so UNterrib-LEE?"

"Oh, that's funny. That's really lovely and hilarious," said Mrs. Purse.

"I would like—" he had a mouthful of wing—"to set Plato's Dialogues to music. It's one of my ambitions. Only—" here he swallowed—"it would make a very boring opera."

"I don't see why."

"Too much recitativo."

"Sing Robert Frost again," Harriet Beecher said.

"Harriet Beecher, don't you nag. You let Mr. Tilbeck eat his meal."

"I don't see that life goes on so unterribly in America," Purse demurred. "The problem of social justice remains, in spite of supermarkets. No one can say it's altogether solved, even in America. Pockets of unemployment all over the country, to take only one aspect. Or take the situation of the migrant workers."

"Ghastly situation," said Mrs. Purse. "Babies in the fields right alongside the pickers. They suckle them in the furrows. That is
nothing
like roast chicken in the open air."

"Or take the moral situation."

"Ghastly moral situation," said Mrs. Purse, discharging a cucumber from a basket. "Have one of these, Mr. Tilbeck—you already have our gratitude. I hope it's not too soon to tell you what a lovely and hilarious week this has been."

"The conventions are loosening. The seams of society are opening. God means very little to the young. We're breeding atheists. The idea of love has lost its sanctity."

Mrs. Purse said coquettishly, "My husband thinks you might be an atheist, Mr. Tilbeck."

"If a lady can make a motor out of chaos, surely God could make the universe," Tilbeck said, "out of similar material."

"There, you see? Of course you're not an atheist."

"She got it to work," Throw said, "I told you she would."

"The universe? I shouldn't wonder. Though I did notice the Milky Way out of kilter last night. A little oil maybe? Observe the twilight, Mrs. Purse. A shade too dark for this hour. I hope you'll do something about it."