Trust (92 page)

"Unless you prefer a stately tread. Dissipation," he yielded, "the first of the cardinal—"

But she jumped up and furiously smothered his mouth with her palm. He licked her loose. "What do you think?" he asked me. "Was I La Rochefoucauld twenty-five years ago? Or more likely Oscar Wilde?"

"Oscar Wilde is
funny,
" my mother said.

"And La Rochefoucauld is wise."

My mother said coldly, "'I can resist everything but temptation.' Now that's funny. You don't have anything like that. You don't have anything smart-aleck, in those aphorisms you're one-hundred-per-cent solemn."

"Bp more generous. Fifty-per-cent. Posterity knows them as Vand's Halforisms. Not that they're only half true, but he believed in them only half his life. In the second half of his life he abandoned trying to live by formula."

"You mean now," my mother said ominously.

"Now," he agreed.

"How are you going to live now?"

"By always remembering to keep breathing."

"Dead!" she yelled. "A formula for being dead! Dead dead dead! Dead and you don't care, dead and you don't know it—"

"
I
didn't overthrow the regime."—He was all reasonableness. "Allegra," he said.

"You wanted to go high!"

"Not for the sensation of height."

"Once you said you'd even be President if they let you—"

"Not in order to be President but to see the sameness of the world. The world is the same seen from all sides. Now there's a machine in the sky to prove it."

"Gangsters. The world is
not
the same. It's not the same for those gangsters and for us, and it's not the same for an Ambassador and for"—her head darted down—"a nobody."

"The same," he said. "Also for the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the mind-gifted and the mind-deprived—"

"All right, then for the good and the evil too. Enoch," she called, as though he were far, "I thought you wanted to do good!"

"Oh no no no no. Not to do good. How can we know which act is good and which not? By the consequences? Who can tell which are the true consequences? Who can live long enough to know?"

She said nothing.

"How does she take it?" he asked. And to me: "Narcissus always vanishes by way of water."

My mother drew vengefully back. "Nick you mean? You heard about Nick? You heard," she said; her lip hung.

"So has every living breathing politician not actually unconscious. Allegra," he told her, "it's out."

"Out? What's out?" Her half-sleeves came stiff against her like black stumps.

"Since late this afternoon every member of the United States Congress knows that but for the grace of the new General's gun we might have sent off a Caesar whose wife was once-upon-a-time not above suspicion. Every member of the Senate knows it. Every member of the Supreme Court knows it The President knows it the public knows it even the Vice-President's got wind of it—"

"It's out?" my mother cried.

"The very Senator William is privy to—my special pleader, mind you—hissed it into my left ear. Depositing carcinogenic fumes therein and causing me to miss two planes out." To me he said, "To William's pal the Senator you're known as a love-child. A pretty phrase. He does better by you than William."

"Now look," my mother began. And almost failed. "I'll tell you who did it Nick did it right out of the devil's mouth—"

"The devil sticks to the retinas only of those he beguiles."

And I: "Not Nick, not Nick," but it was to Enoch I addressed this.

She blasted me. "Idiot! Who else let it out? Who!"

"Pettigrew," Enoch said. "He got it from his little girl and would have upstaged the coup with it if the Russians hadn't upstaged everything already with the Sputnik. You see?" he said. "There's Nick again—translated to the heavens. He sails the sea of the sky in his spy-glass. Do you grieve?" he insisted, fixing me colorlessly, lazily.

"She knew him two days!" my mother shouted.

"And two nights. She knew him. Do you grieve? She grieves." He said, "I knew him, he didn't believe in himself."

"Didn't he though? Arrogant as they come," my mother said. "He had more self-confidence than anyone alive."

"True. What I mean is he didn't believe he was alive. Like few men, like all solipsists, he doubted his existence by declaring it Most of us declare it by doubting it. A Chinese philosopher dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke he said: Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?"

"Enoch, go to hell," my mother said.

"That's hard, you're hard on Pettigrew. Any good Democrat would have done the same. He saw his opportunity—if you find tar on your brush you use it"

She wailed at him, "What's going to happen?"

"Observe. For all future appointments the Administration will be asking for references from the chastity-belt manufacturers. Or else the Senate may confirm a whole row of nuns for Ambassadors. The Administration," he ended, "is smeared."

"And us! Us. Smeared," my mother said.

"Freed."

"I don't believe in freedom," and sat herself down on Enoch's suitcase, and said nothing more. But she seemed to be listening, not to him. It was as if she was listening to the hairs of her head grow and prosper, to assure herself of life.

Six stamps displaying Oriental jugs; a letter postmarked Shikarpur, Pakistan:

It
was
your father. Purse read it out to me from the paper, which is rather expensive in the overseas edition. What a surprise! Well, my dear, even a Purse swallows the blunder, since identity is everything in life, isn't it?—Which is why every Purse has its identity card. (We don't like to risk losing the children in a heathen land.) Purse says it was almost like accusing you of a certain sin expressly forbidden, which I won't mention by name. We are all hoping very much that you will forgive us, the children especially hope so. Except for Gandhi they are all now quite proficient in kitchen-Urdu, also Harriet Beecher can say water-buffalo, though it's been only a little more than a month, but they want to be remembered to you in English!

If we can be of any moral help to you in your deep sorrow and loss do let us know. Purse is rather busy with his bones, but he begs you to trust in the solace of the Lord, Whose ways are inscrutable. He giveth and He taketh. We are all borrowers from God's purse. Thoreau in particular sends you special regards. He asks me to tell you that he's proud of having been oarsman for an actual symbol of American Affluence. (We're now all very conscious of home values, you see.) He knew it all the time! He never mentioned a word to us, but now he keeps boasting that you
told
him about your mother and her great position in the world. He even quotes you verbatim as having said she is "extraordinarily rich." Of course he always exaggerates, and Purse has made him recognize that it's his chief vice to blow things up to make himself sound important. But in this case it wasn't hyperbole, was it? To think you're actually the daughter of Allegra Vand!

What happened in the past between her and your father (to think Mr. T.
was
your father all the time! may he R.I.P.), not that we believe everything in the overseas edition, it probably comes over all diluted, but surely your mother has by now compensated for anything she may once have been sorry for by acts of charity and philanthropy, which are a privilege of the affluent alone. Mr. T.'s passing may very well have renewed old regrets in her heart, and nothing discharges remorse so much as discharging one's duty and one's purse.

We Purses hope you will not discharge
us
from the care of your memory, my dear, though our acquaintance was so brief. Still, our mutual reverence for Mr. T. binds us irrevocably. He was always very generous with us, and this is a land where generosity is necessary. You should see the poor pitiful cripples and orphans in the streets! Also you would be amazed at how much it costs Purse every day to get transportation out from Shikarpur to the dig. (The first group of bones, alas, has proved to be marsupial.) There are two abandoned automobiles piled up nearby, both in a condition of incomparable disrepair, and I am hoping to work out some kind of rapprochement between the engine of the one on top and the body of the (me on bottom. You would not believe the cost of spare parts here!

It is also very expensive to keep a special nurse for Gandhi, who has become utterly uncontrollable in the new environment. He likes to run around with all the wild little Mohammedans, who have unfortunately taught him to say Allah. There is a mosque nearby, and he is continually running away to it. We thank God Purse's Ford wasn't for India instead, where there are polytheists of the most primitive sort.

Well, let us hear from you, my dear. If your very kind mother in her present reevaluations feels the moral need to express herself in good works, and/or should you be desirous of following in the very lovely tradition of generosity your memorable father established toward us, you may trust to our most profound and exuberant gratitude. (On the enclosed sheet please find all the children's clothing sizes, including underwear. They like bright colors, except George Fox, though Purse doesn't approve. However I must ask you to ignore the notations for Gandhi. Since our arrival in the East we cannot get him to keep a stitch on. We've never had a nude child before—Purse of course is very upset—and we are prayerful that it is only the sudden change in the drinking water. As you will understand, under the circumstances his nurse had to be a male one, unusual for these parts, but the young man himself is unusual and quite good-looking in spite of dark skin.)

Hoping to hear from you,

With best wishes,
(Mrs.) Ethel Purse

Postcard displaying head of an American President, postmarked San Francisco, California:

Dear Mme. Karenina,

I quit.

Love,
Vronsky

Telegram, Western Union, collect:

ALLEGRA DID YOU GET MY POSTCARD HAVE MOVED IN WITH GREATAUNT OF MY MOTHERS I RAN INTO OUT HERE SHE WAS TWENTY THREE LAST MAY SORRY TO LEAVE YOU IN EDITORIAL LURCH PLEASE FEEL FREE TO USE MY THREE RECENT HAIKUS IN BUSHEL BASKET WITHOUT CHARGE AS SINCERE TOKEN OF MY REGRET FAITHFULLY YOURS EDWARD MCGOVERN FORMER EDITOR IN CHIEF BUSHEL BASKET PEE YES NEVER SELL OUT TO COMMAS

My mother was right. Enoch stayed in bed until four o'clock in the afternoon for three months. Meanwhile my mother traveled. The first day of the fourth month my stepfather rose up and announced he was going to read the Bible. And he did. He read the King James all the way through. Then he began taking lessons in Hebrew from a refugee my mother imported from Oslo. She had met him in the art museum there on one of her trips. The number tattooed on Enoch's teacher's forearm was daily covered by phylacteries. He had a beard, like a spy. Under the refugee's tutelage Enoch read the Bible all the way through in Hebrew. It took him three years. The refugee shaved off his beard, having by then gotten the hang of America; he did not wish to be mistaken for a bohemian. He was a serious and lyrical man. He abandoned his phylacteries. At the end of that time Enoch began the study of the Ethics of the Fathers. It was an easy book and took two months. Then he asked for the whole Talmud.

Where I was and what I did during that period I will not tell; I went to weddings. But my mother traveled. Once she flew to the country where she was to have been chatelaine of the Embassy. Even from the outside the Embassy was glorious. Its pillars were resplendent. All the same she thought little of that place: she did not like the tune of its official language.

Pelham Bay, The Bronx, 1957—Echo Bay, New Rochelle, 1963

On November 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was assassinated, I wrote the last words of
Trust,
my first novel. I had begun it while still in my twenties, and finished it seven years later. In actuality there had been two "first" novels before then—the earlier one never completed, though it had already accumulated three hundred thousand words. I had planned it as a "philosophical" fiction; in graduate school I had come under the influence of Eliseo Vivas, at the time a well-known professor of philosophy, and with his character and views in mind, I named my protagonist Rafael Caritas. His antagonist, as I conceived it (the metaphysical versus the pragmatic), was a man of the type of Sidney Hook, a legendary figure in my undergraduate days at New York University: in my aborted novel he was called Seymour Karp. It never occurred to me—I learned it painfully years afterward—that it might be perilous to import real persons into fiction. My idea was to confront Passion with Reason. Of course I sided with Passion (I was twenty-two), which explained why a stanza from one of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" supplied the title:
Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love.
("For Mercy has a human heart, / Pity a human face, / And Love, the human form divine, / And Peace, the human dress.")

Rafael Caritas consumed years before he, or I, ran out of philosophical steam. Vivas's devotion to what he termed Neo-Thomism had befuddled me; so did his lectures on Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics.
What was even more confounding, though, was his fury at the Nuremberg trials. The men in the dock were wicked beyond wicked, he raged—but the Allied tribunal was wicked too: it stood for victors' justice. Then what should be done with these murderous miscreants? Punish them, Vivas said, according to a practice not unknown in certain parts of his native South America: bury each man up to his neck in earth, and send riders at a gallop to trample the exposed heads. It was an argument worthy of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Vivas, even when he was jovially avuncular, as he sometimes was, intimidated me: his black hair, slicked back, gleamed like shoe polish; his foreign rasp had a demonic twist; his classroom manner was a roar. Rafael Caritas was far tamer.

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
was slowly proceeding (though without the horsemen), pullulating with new characters I could hardly fathom or control. No resolution was anywhere in sight when I came, one afternoon, on a seductive announcement in one of the little magazines (as the plethora of serious quarterly journals was then styled). A publisher was soliciting short novels. Short! The word—the idea—captivated.
Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
was winding on and on, like a Möbius strip: where was its end? As a kind of interim project, I set out to write a short novel. It turned out to be a long one. It turned out to be
Trust.