Trust (80 page)

"Well in that case I don't see why we bothered to bring the sleeping bags, all that fuss for nothing—I thought this was going to be an uninhabited island," Stefanie Pettigrew complained, "don't you ever keep a promise?—Well for sweet Pete's ugly sake!"

She had recognized me. So had William's son. His face looked oddly vulnerable. Then I knew why. Something was missing—the helmet of power. He had come to this place because he had uncovered evidence of its putative emptiness. He had come furtively. An old notion shifted in me: loss. I felt that I had once loved him, but no more. Still the prong of love picked in me. Whom else then did I love?

The Purses. They never were part of this story (this ostensible father's tale), and here they take leave of it. But no. Both statements are wrong. Charon the ferryman is part of every story; a Purse had crossed me over. Nor do I mean that the Purses will now vanish out of the event. Physically, they remain. Physically, here stands Purse himself inside his rubbery athlete's bag, always faintly panting, always faintly purifying. Four nights in a row his wife, abetted by his own healthy sleep, has betrayed him. If Mrs. Purse should conceive an eighth child, perhaps it will be halfblood to me; perhaps not. The question is of no moment. The Purses will last, as Purses, forever. Occasionally they will throw up a little god who will intuit that the Inner Light must never be covered over with matter. The Purses love matter only. Purse loves money and bones. Mrs. Purse loves money and flesh: flesh of her flesh, and that other indwelling flesh that is necessary to incite and begin flesh of her flesh. The Purses are, as we say nowadays, monomaniacs. Mrs. Purse has her one deathly joke. Purse has his one deathly bargain-hunt: that the cost of nine should equal the cost of one. Neither of these consistencies is what makes them monomaniacal. Mrs. Purse, after all, though a bit of a fool, is admittedly an ex-prodigy, a genius, an uncanny machinist and inventor. She has invented more than that automatic stair-climbing wheelchair for her aged mother. I learned, but have not the wit to describe, the impressive nature of many more of her inventions, all practical, homelike, essential, enduring; all duly lodged with the United States Patent Office. And Purse, as his son affirmed, is not very obscure, at least not to other paleontologists. Though not a genius like his wife, unlike most men he is intimate with Hyracotherium (the little eohippus, whom Harriet Beecher Stowe Purse would have delighted to ride, had it only survived into our Cenozoic Era); he is one of the few persons alive privileged to have looked upon beauty bare in the remains, like a suggestion of necklace, of the Eocene Coryphodon; he can infer a quality of brain from a quantity of skull insides; he can identify a whole huge remote fossil animal from one small bone of one of its most casual toes. Plainly, the Purses count, and must be taken seriously. Therein lies their monomania: they take themselves seriously. But they must not expect that we will.

The Purse children. Of these it can most profitably be said that they
are
children. Let me explain. (Hold. Are you impatient for knowledge of my love? Unlike you, I have infinite leisure. A paradox: for "you" can mean only myself; I am my only reader. Then let me explain.) Children, though they are always becoming older, hence always becoming someone else, someone other, do not know this truth about themselves. They think themselves static, they think themselves eternal exactly as they are. This indeed is the real, not the imagined, condition of elves, and is why we fear them. (Do we believe in elves? No. In the concept of elves? Assuredly.) The static is what we fear in life. Stasis is itself a monomania, and children, who believe that they
are
and hold themselves altogether apart from becoming, are therefore natural monomaniacs. The Purse children must be repudiated even more decisively than their parents. Moreover they are uncommonly verbal, in the manner of children and elves; they adore words, but not for their uses—rather, as magic-in-themselves. (C/. Rumpelstiltskin.
Vide
lyre and lute for liar and loot, where music, and rogues are indistinguishable; or derisible-dirigible, wherein the substitution of a single letter can produce a flying machine out of mere mockery.) Magic is inanity, is imbecile, and exists for its own sake; so do children; so do elves. And we fear them all equally. And equally they all despise us when they know we fear them. Even in setting it down I have trembled at the terrifying chatter (word-love) of the Purse children. Stasis. They do not progress. What they say leads endlessly, leads nowhere. I have ground my teeth to hear them speak. Charon plying his pole talks all the way. Beware. The Purse children, who would not have me (as elves keep from us the secret of their arcane lives), torment me. I fear the quotation-marks that come like signs out of their mouths to warn me they will speak. Seeing those two small tongues curled in air I crave escape: deafness, blindness, only let me not be obliged to put down a magic as obvious as Purselets' speech; I dread and despise these Purselets. They are repudiated out of the tale. I am glad to see them go.

I see them go. Purse takes them away, herds them up the hill. They are not talkative now but queerly dumb, dumbstruck. Purse takes them away because ("Look who's on the welcoming committee!" Stefanie says) he senses an impropriety in the amazed confrontation on the beach. We all sense the same: Stefanie and William's son, in search of a desert island, have arrived on this populous one to sleep together, in bags or otherwise. Purse shuns adultery. On the other hand, being "liberal," he resolves not to take note of it. He snores through his wife's. He shuts his eyes to his host's. But here it is, raw and open. Too much is too much. The children must be removed from this animal heat. He guides them slanting upward along the slope, sand metamorphosing into grass; he guides them into the house where it is cooler than the bottom of the sea. Here they will be safe from the animal heat of the sun. They file through the pompous door. And immediately a strange mushroom-like smell tenses and teases, bitter but obscurely pleasurable, so tantalizingly vague that it is nearly inaccessible to their struggle for it: it shudders on the bare threshold of acuteness, and will not disclose itself. Mold. Minutely it gauzes and grazes the refrigerator's, the sofas', the piano's backs and legs and undersides. The first day-heat has inflamed it; its bluish velvety steam is like the licking path of a tongue. Now it grows remote, too withdrawn for the coarseness of a fingertip. They cannot recapture the paradisal smell, and regret consciousness.

In this way Purse leaves the tale. He is spiritually fastidious: and the lovers have arrived. Hence the tale (a lovers' tale) repudiates him.

Hereafter the Purses are present, but accessible to matter only: though spirit may rule the island.

"You always seem to turn up," Stefanie rushed on at me without a second's gap, "first that office party thing, and now, when a person wants
privacy—
"

Mrs, Purse intervened by sticking out her manly hand. "Ethel Purse. Hostess-surrogate for the island's boss. So far as I've observed he doesn't turn anyone away. Stay for a meal, dears, whoever you are."

"Well for goodness' sake we've
come
to stay. For
days.
We certainly didn't expect to find a whole mob."

"The mob are Purses. By their myriads shall you know them. This is private property, dears."

"For goodness' sake we know that. We weren't looking for Yellowstone Park. We weren't looking for a place that's advertised in the
National Geographic.
It's your fault," she told William's son. "You said if there was anybody at all it'd be some seedy old caretaker who maybe wouldn't even
be
here, and if he was we could pay him to get out—"

"Ah well," Mrs. Purse said gaily, "I'm afraid bribery won't work with us Purses! The catch is we're not due to leave here for another day or so—you know all Purses have their catches, and
we
keep ours tight shut against monetary temptation. And when
we
go that'll still leave Miss Tilbeck, and heaven knows when her father'll decide he's had enough, I suppose not until the cool weather sets in—"

"You mean there're more?" Stefanie said, staring up the hill.

"Yes dear. The Tilbecks, I said the Tilbecks. And one more Purse, not included in the recently departed pack—Harriet Beecher, who at this moment is writing a letter to Eternity upon the faceless deep. Bottle with a note in it," she explained, all good humor.

"Well isn't this really ridiculous. Till
what?
I mean," Stefanie lectured, "Anybody who's
on
this place is really trespassing. That's law. I hope you all realize that."

Mrs. Purse's radiance paled before this plain hostility. "That's gall, dear.
We
were invited."

"
We
know the owner."

"He appears to know multitudes," Mrs. Purse noted.

"It's not a he, it's a she." It was clear that the girl had recently accumulated certain limited facts. Outside the world of Miss Jewett's long rows of file cabinets suddenly loomed and fled, and at their end William's son, a steadfast centurion, dangled his doffed helmet. "Unless you mean the trustee?"

"Oh shut up, Stef," William's son ordered. "How'd you get here?" This was aimed, enveloped in a furious growl, at me.

I borrowed from the nearest Purse. "I was invited."

"Bully for you," Stefanie said, and kicked at a pebble like an egg. "You usually show up even when you're not."

"Not what?" Mrs. Purse wondered.

"Invited."

"Ah but she's the guest of her father—there's such an attachment between those two. Very touching, considering they're strangers. When he gets back be sure to watch for it. Loyalty and so on."

"Look, she doesn't
have
a father," Stefanie corrected.

Mrs. Purse said. "Hm."—A syllable of indication leading to vindication.

"Well she doesn't. Unless you mean her stepfather. And he's in Washington."

I demurred quickly, "He isn't. Not yet"

"For goodness' sake my own fiancé told me, you think he'd lie? Your stepfather had to beat it down there early this morning because this country he's supposed to go to's in trouble or something."

"But the hearings aren't till—" I broke off and looked at William's son, who at once looked angrily at the sand.

"Till, till," Stefanie parroted. "Till
what,
I keep asking."

"Til
beck,
" Mrs. Purse provided craftily. "You're gazing right
at
one, dear. If you don't mind my saying so I should think you'd know this young lady's name. You certainly seem to know
her.
"

"Sure, we go to parties together all the time. Though that's not her name, what you said. 'Sfunny, she's got the same name
he
has"—and arched an immaculate thumbnail backward toward William's son. He stood glumly; a mouse of violence ran in his eye.

Mrs. Purse repeated loudly, "Tilbeck?"

"That's not their name, I just told you."

"Mm." Vindication Number Two.

"All the same they're not relations, it's sort of funny."

"Ah, they're not," Mrs. Purse murmured.

I burst in insistently: "What do you mean Enoch's in Washington?"

"They've started those hearings." But this was a surrender to despair: William's son, I saw, did not care to speak to me. Astonishment victimized him as it did not victimize his fiancée. She readily adapted to perplexities and surprises. Like Tilbeck (how quick and strange the parallel!), she took them for natural forces, and took herself for the same. She appeared to love to be confounded, and to confound. But William's son was a disillusioned moralizer. It had not yet settled in him that I was there. He had expected nobody. He dealt badly with chimeras, wrong turnings, breakages. Abruptly he threw out at me: "They got them going extra early."

"The hearings? Why?" I demanded.

"Oh
don't
start talking politics, it's
such
a bother." Stefanie allowed herself to slip into a shadowed hollow in the sand. Her stretching rubescent arm found a ledge of motor and she leaned deliciously, rubbing a powder of rust into the pocket crease of her elbow; henna glowed on henna; the curve of her wrist yearned downward like a rosy swan. "Look, I didn't come all this way in that damn ship just to listen to politics."

But Mrs. Purse was fascinated. She was fascinated by Stefanie, who seemed stuffed with vindications. "That's a handsome little craft you've got there," she said placatingly. •Twenty-footer?"

"
I
don't know."

"You measure fore to aft on a straight line parallel to the center line, excluding sheer. Don't count bowsprits or bumpkins. Looks to
me
like a twenty-footer. I see you don't have any sidelights on 'er. Not required to, probably, under twenty-six." A joyous cordiality lit her.

"That's man's talk," Stefanie said disgustedly, "and if you ask me it's just a bother. That ship's an engagement present from my father and that's all I have to know about it. He didn't say I'd have to join the damn
Navy
to ride in it. I hate boat-talk like that even worse than politics."

Mrs. Purse reflected on the collapse of her comradeliness. "That's your loss, dear, if you don't want to gain something out of a Purse. From the way she sounded coming in I'd say she needs a bit of a tune-up."

"That ship's brand
new,
" Stefanie said, miffed.

"Is it monogrammed?" I asked.

"Monogrammed? Well for Pete's sake you don't monogram a ship."

"Boat!" Mrs. Purse cried. "
Boat,
not ship."

"You don't monogram a broom either. Engagement present, is he
that
rich?" I said, mimicking a memory.

"Who?"

"Your father."

"Oh—" A bruise of recognition swelled her mouth. "You mean about that business at your bon voyage thing. What I said that time? You still mad about that? I always have to ask how rich people are. My fiancé"—untypically she mocked the word—"doesn't think it's polite. William thinks I get it from my mother, it's all because my mother didn't go to Miss Lamb's or Miss Jewett's. Well for goodness' sake she
couldn't,
she was in California. I mean-even
William
says Miss Jewett's is full of nouveaus nowadays anyhow, and he doesn't send
his
kids there, so how come he blames my mother for never having gone? I mean if he wouldn't send his own kids? I mean look at Nanette—"