Trust (76 page)

"End of summer," Mrs. Purse murmured. "Charming. We'll miss your teasing, Mr. T."

"More and more," said Purse, gnawing at the knob at the end of his joint, "the old values fall. Honor becomes the appearance of honor. Authority becomes the appearance of authority."

"For one thing," Mrs. Purse said, "your shear-pin was broken off clean. The universe is more reliable than that."

"Reliability becomes the appearance of reliability."

"Ghastly," Mrs. Purse said. "Rinse your chin, Walt Whitman. Who wants more?"

The second bird was brought to the table. They all wanted more. Further disputation over distribution of two drumsticks. Mohandas K. Gandhi got one. Purse—reserving decision in an access of fairness—got the other.

It was nearly night.

Mrs. Purse addressed me: "Your father is a charming companion. Delightful."

Purse said, "Generous. Very generous."

Mrs. Purse said, "I look forward to a charming correspondence."

Tilbeck said, "There I'll fail you. I don't write much. As a rule."

Moths were solemnly revolving.

"Here," Mrs. Purse explained, "we follow the universe slavishly. We go to bed with the stars."

"There's nothing else to do," Tilbeck said.

"The habit of electric light makes one forget the ordinances of the Lord," Purse said. "It's very black without a moon."

"Fine moon tonight," Tilbeck said, watching the children ' dance under it.

"The moon makes them go wild. They look so primitive."

"It's only Dodge Ball."

"But they use a stone. Poor Dee. He always gets trampled."

"I should like to've known you in the Stone Age, Mrs. Purse. You would have advanced us to Iron in a month."

"Charming. What a pity you don't correspond. \My husband writes voluminously."

Purse dug. Then he put down his spade and began fo bury the debris of dinner. Into the hole went the bones of two chickens.

"A paleontologist like yourself might dig all that up in the Fourth Space Age," Tilbeck said, "and then what?"

"Maybe by then this island will have disappeared," Mrs. Purse reflected.

"Where could it go?"

"Oh, Mr. T., don't throw your bottle in."

"Empty—"

"Yes, but the children would so like to put a note in it. And give it to the tide. Harriet Beecher asked me specially to ask you."

The bottle was spared burial. Purse covered over the hole. "I think it's time now."

"Yes, it's time," said his wife. "Though the moon is like the sun."

Stones were dropping one by one into the brook.

"We're coming," Bronson Alcott called.

"You'll play again tomorrow. Manny, is your chin clean? It's time. Where's Dee?"

No one knew. —A search. They found him asleep under the table.

"His mouth's all funny."

"It's purple."

"It's the color of the house-mold."

"Make him walk."

"He won't. He won't wake up."

"Why does he smell like that?"

"He smells nice. He smells like Mr. T."

"Ah."

"He was in wading."

"He helped himself, didn't he?"

"Wasn't the cork in tight?"

"I think," said Tilbeck, "you've misnamed the boy." Purse said: "We meant him to emulate a saint. Self-restraint and discipline, discipline. We had in mind that sort of saint."

"But he wants to be a god," Tilbeck said.

They carried Bacchus off to his tent.

"Good night, Mr. T."

"Good night, Miss Tilbeck."

"Good night," I answered, startled.

"Good night."

No one had intimated it would be an idyll. Not Enoch, not William—not even my mother, who knew.

Curious: in color there is a difference between what is pale and what is light. We dark heads are notorious for our attraction to you blonds, whom the sun has honored with imitative pigment. In my mother's family we were all black-haired; occasionally—like my grandfather—carpet-brown. It was the Scottish element—or so my mother analyzed our Italian looks: she blamed it on Caesar's legions. "Mediterranean types on Sauchiehall Street," she liked to say of Glasgow—"short dark little wops of women," and on account of the Roman invasion she had always gone to the pale. William, milkishly pale, turning pinker and pinker, the underside of a white cat's tongue lapping milk. Enoch, white skin, hands very white and square, like geometrical abstractions, eyes pale as theories. He was one of those blond Jews of whom it can never be said that they remind us of the prophets. The golden-bearded Jesus of the North, that mild blond womanish lamb of the calendars, is a sham. So outwardly was Enoch. Two thousand years' absence from the Near East had left the curve of his mind intact, but had colored him differently. He should have looked like an Arab. Instead he was the perfect Pole, the perfect Ukrainian, the perfect Shtchepan or Ivan of the Russian provinces in the Pale—urbanized and scholarized out of farmer strength and sinew and farmer hulk and bulk. Call it, with the biologists, protective coloration. When the creature enters the environment, the environment enters the creature. But it never protected. The true Shtchepans and Ivans knew which faces to smite, in spite of the faces' having become like their own. Enoch's paleness was not William's, though only history, not the spectrograph, can tell us the reason for it.

And here at last was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck—a very blond man, son of a Swede (if he was to be trusted)—looking into the fire, which sparked like a live wire on snow (re-igniting itself on remnants of grease), muttering good night to nine pale Purses. The sun, when it chooses to honor its northern people with paleness, makes them pay for it with fear of the sun; they shun what they reflect. Perhaps the sun is jealous of its rivals, even when it has appointed them itself. But it might be otherwise. The paleness might signify fatigue rather than favoritism. What of Prometheus after he stole the fire? Presumably he was tired. It was his one great act. Nothing could equal it, not even his noble passivity afterward with the vulture. So with the passive blonds of the North. Having seized the color of the sun to live in their hair—through what exhausting scenes of mythological prowess or brawn or cunning who can say?—they have exerted themselves as far as they can. They have taken the sun for beauty, and it is the end of their obeisance to beauty; there can be no obeisance without impulse. They have done themselves in. Their pale heads and arms faintly tissued with pale hairs droop across the northern cap of the world. Race-justice does not allow us to criticize the Danes and the English and the Germans for their spiritual languor. It is no small task to have leaped into the copper pot of the sun and come out dyed with the eternal gleam. If, having done this much, they have no energy left for the other masques of brilliance, who can blame them?

None of this describes Tilbeck. He was not pale; he was light. How explain the difference? The dark heads of the South have taken their sober colors from the black shadows under a congregation of trees; yet they skip with vigor, and compose themselves into beauty aimlessly and easily. Perhaps, having opted for the wood, they have learned the wood's powers of secret quick growth and hasty composition, and the lush lesson of the sap. Perhaps, having opted for the wood, through which the sun is strained and enters poorly, they have had to learn to generate their own profuseness. No one knows the answer, though Tilbeck wore the answer in his skin. Animation—a collection of vitalities, all harbored cautiously, none wasted (as pale Purse, running, wasted his)—gathered in him as in a headquarters. He had the authority of a nodule or centrality of light—not alone the centrality that issues, but the centrality that receives. The firelight charged at the fair fine flat tongue of hair that lay across his foreskull as though seeking a brother. He took what he took as though he were capable of taking more and even more. I thought of the tree in the swamp and its appetite for light, and just then he gave a savage spit into the fire and told me he was part Greek. It justified the Nicholas.

"Like Polygon then," I said, bewildered into satire. "Greek like Polygon who owns the boatyard who brought the—"

"Sure. Polygon's my cousin. I always send him business."

"You're not Greek."—And put scorn for liars in it.

"What's the matter, you don't like being Greek? What I am you are. And
I
dreamed up the Parthenon."

"Slaves built it."

"I wasn't a slave."

"In Greece? How do you know?"

"Because I know. A man knows when he's free. That moon means business. The size of it. Means autumn."

"But it's hot." I had decided to be peevish.

"Hot," he echoed, "as helL This place is good for another month, I figure. At most"

"Then where will you go?"

"Somewhere else."

"Don't you ever plan?"

"They're the slaves. The planners. You've never known anyone but slaves, hah, girlie?"

"I suppose." Then I gave in. "I suppose you mean people like William. Did you ever meet William?"

"Never had the misery. The Ambassador I knew welL Prize slave of them all."

"In Egypt"

"Hm?"

"Enoch always says he was a slave in Egypt" An interval. Finally I put it to him: "Would you have spoiled it for Enoch? Wrecked the Ambassadorship?—Told those three newspapers," I stated.

"Mm, now you're getting subtle. Probing."

"But would you really? If I hadn't come?"

"Oh you," he said vaguely. "What d'you have to do with anything?"

I would not let go. "The bargain. I know every detail. I really do. Tourist with guidebook."

I was touched that he did not laugh. He smiled instead, the kind of smile that trembles gradually into being, so that for a long while it seems to beat in doubt of its own self-creation: imagine Buddha in the moment
before
that arch-moment by which he is usually represented. —Were his teeth clean? It was too dim to tell. "You have possibilities. Self-comprehension. At your age Allegra was obtuse as a wall. A drop of my Greek in you maybe."

"But it
was
a bargain."

"You think I care if they make him Ambassador to the Court of the Angel Gabriel? If he wants it let him have it."

"My mother wants it."

"And he wants her. If he wants her let him have her. The high and mighty Mrs. Vand, Queen of the Universe."

"You don't like her."

He said narrowly, "Keen of you to spot that."

"I hate sarcasm," I informed him. "Why don't you like her?"

"Same reason you don't'

"I like her," I protested.

"Did you say something before about not being able to distinguish between the real and the unreal? Be humble, girlie."

"But I do like her," I said. "She's an interesting woman."

"She's a stupid woman. She's obtuse. She wants everything."

I looked around for logic. There were only the trees, the table, the kings, the white moon. "Well, you want everything too. You said it yourself."

"I deny it."

"You said a man knows when he's free."

"Being free isn't wanting."

"Being free is doing anything you want to in the whole world."

"A line not your own—Polly want a cracker?"

"I said that once before today," I apologized. "I said it coming over in the boat. I was telling that boy about my mother."

"And preparing him perfectly for the hypocrisy of the pulpit. That's your mother's Philosophy, I recognize it. She's an ass."

"She's a bigger ass," I flared, "to go against her philosophy if that's what it is. You've never let her do what she wants to do. Or me. Always intervening. She locked me in a room in Europe because of you. I would be in Europe right now if not for you. I'd be in London and Paris and Copenhagen and Rome."

"Europe? You wanted that?"

"No," I said, ashamed.

Musing laughter.

On account of it I emphatically resumed: "You've always been in the way. A schnorrer with your hand out What gives you the right?"

More laughter. "You."

"You just said I had nothing to do with anything."

"Not with me. But I can't help it about them—if they've always been afraid because of you. You've made them afraid."

"You've made them afraid. You're the one."

"You. You're the issue."

"Don't say issue. You've threatened and threatened—"

"Now and then I tell them I might come up to town. Is that a threat?"

"And badgered them from one end of the earth to the other—"

"The time we met by accident in France? That was just a coincidence. That Dutch girl that used to take care of you—you remember?"

"I remember," I said.

"I saw you on the beach. Couple of times I saw you. An ordinary little girl. Talking French to another kid. I wouldn't've noticed if
she
hadn't said who you were."

"I never saw you. I saw your bicycle. Bells on it"

"Bells! That's right," he said, impressed.

"I found your book."

"What book?"

"A little handbook of wild flowers."

"—What a bitch," he said reflectively.

"Anneke?"

"Also true. But I meant Allegra."

This time for some reason I did not contradict. The remnant of the fire sputtered. He took out his flashlight and stood it on its head on the table.

"They all think I want things from them, but they miss the point. They think I have a terrible ego. But the whole point is I don't. I'm the new man, modern man, Man without Ego. What I mean is this: I don't want anything. I don't want anything.
They're
always wanting something themselves, so they can't believe it, they can't understand it. That's why they can't cope with me. I can make them do anything I seem to want because there's nothing I really want. That's the secret, and it isn't a secret at all—excuse the paradox. It's just that the plainer a thing is, the harder it is to see it. Not wanting anything is what makes me perfectly free.
I'm
never angry, and your mother always is, day and night. It's true, hah?
I
never lose my temper. Why? Because I'm never disappointed. Why? Because there's nothing I'm ever wanting. There's not a thing in the wide world I want. Or ever wanted."