Trust (4 page)

"Do Bulgarians kiss?" I wondered. "I thought only Frenchmen did that."

"Ah," my mother threatened sadly, "Europe is a strange continent. Of course you'll go with letters of introduction; it will be different for you. Still, we should plan an itinerary. First you must go to England and see the Bridge of Sighs at Cambridge, and then directly to Florence: it's the most aristocratic city. Then you must all the time avoid refugees, who are everywhere, even these days; cultivate the indigenous only. It's a rule I never fail to practise, except in the case of noble families."

It almost seemed she no longer believed in a classless society.

Three weeks after this conversation my passport came in the mail, without incident.

"They gave it to you!" My mother was incredulous. "And without settling things! Not a soul came to question me," she continued to marvel. "But it isn't logical. After all, I
was
a member of the Society for Revolutionary Ideals! I belonged to the Marxist Book Club! And besides," she wailed, "I'm the author of
Marianna Harlow!
" She blew through her nose in astonishment or vexation: "Do you suppose that Enoch—"

But Enoch was still in Geneva.

The summer wheeled on sluggishly, until in the brilliant heart of July it teetered, hung poised, and suddenly stopped dead. On the terrace the aspidistra in their ceramic pots withered. Night never came. It did not rain. The days were as pointless as childhood afternoons.

In the mornings my mother took me shopping with her. We moved slowly down the long row of air-conditioned department stores, through endless revolving doors; there were high flags on lances over the street, and not a pucker in them. Through the perfume mist that meandered in the cooled currents inside the stores we could smell the cars in the street, glistening, yet quiescent, trapped like beaten doves in front of traffic lights, their exhausts rising and mingling with the odors of gasoline, molten tar, the fiery circles of breathing manhole-covers. The city burned. We went from counter to counter, touching everything—kerchiefs, gloves, buckles, moth-bags, jewel-boxes, nooses of pearls, the rigid wrists of manikins, bits of leather, candlesticks, tea sets and trays from Japan, Denmark, Italy. In one place, murmuring saws about the English weather, we bought a khaki raincoat for me, but the rest of the time we eschewed escalators and silently circled the lower floors, fanned into a kind of trance by the confusion of scents, the flash of glass cases, the idle shudder of the feet of little dogs.

After lunch my mother would leave me and go to her room and sleep until dinner.

I began to read newspapers feverishly and irrepressibly. I read every edition of every paper. I read the funnies, the beauty columns, the editorials, the lovelorn advice, the political analysts, the women's pages, the advertisements down to the dreariest minim of color, price, and branch-store location, the lost-and-found boxes, the captions of pictures, the classified sections, the letters to the editor.

I also read the news.

It was a brutal and curious time. Old ladies were dying of heat prostration; in Montana cows swooned. A New England farmer became heir to a dukedom. Everywhere children were falling down wells, down drains, down ten-inch pipes. In the cities the young girls were already jumping. They jumped from bridges; from penthouse windows; from the railings of national monuments. They left behind passionate notes pinned to their dresser-scarves. In Indonesia an American philologist was arrested for paddling a rubber boat from isle to isle at three o'clock in the morning.

Toward the end of July the heat broke with a roar of rain and roots of lightning. My mother came out of her room into the sudden night of the terrace, and stood under the awning amid the dead plants.

"Seriously," my mother said in her somnolent summer voice, "that dress I brought. You ought to wear it. You ought to have a going-away party."

I tore off the theatre page and made a boat out of it and sent it on to capsize in the torrent that poured off the awning; dried white sleep-particles cracked in the comers of my mother's eyes as she watched.

"Is there anything in the papers about a disturbance?" she inquired after a moment.

"No. Everything is very quiet and ordinary."

"I mean in Bulgaria. In Sofia perhaps. That sort of disturbance."

"Nothing has happened anywhere."

"Poor Enoch. He must still be talking. I'd feel better if they'd have their revolution and get it over with—then he'd have nothing to do. As it is, there's no telling when he'll come home. We'll have your party anyhow."

"It isn't necessary, you know."

"Necessary?" My mother observed me with deliberation. "On the contrary, it's urgent. How else do you expect to become acquainted with decent society? That college of yours did nothing for you."

"I expect it civilized me a bit."

"Civilization contributes nothing toward marriageability," my mother remarked crisply: she had come brightly awake. "If anything, it detracts from it."

"You know a great deal about marriage," I said. "You've had so much experience with it."

"Don't be impudent—it sounds so labored, coming from you. Men have always wanted to marry me. It's not an original idea, but I don't hesitate to believe that I show a certain
écart.
"

I was sure she meant
éclat
(her flights into foreignisms were usually unfortunate), but I let it pass.

"An absence of civilization," I suggested.

"Don't be too shrewd," advised my mother. "I may lack culture, but that's one of the privileges of wealth. I have an abundance of talents to make up for it. Moreover, my talents aren't clichés, like so many people's. It's not what I
can
do, but what I can't"

"What you can't?" I repeated without expression, recovering the soaked paper boat; it dissolved into paste and grime under my fingers.

"Certainly. I can't be ordinary. I can't bear that. I can't take anything seriously, and I can't be bored. I would rather go to sleep. And I can't understand myself—that's a talent too."

"Or anyone else," I supplied.

"What makes you say that? It would distress me to be somebody else even for a minute. But that doesn't mean I have no sympathies. I consider myself very sympathetic. If I weren't sympathetic I wouldn't be fretting about Enoch."

"
Are
you fretting about him?"

"Isn't it obvious? These impromptu conferences always worry me. I'm convinced they're dangerous. You read so much about assassinations these days."

"No one," I offered with authority, "has been assassinated during the whole month of July."

"Is July finished?" my mother said vaguely, beginning reluctantly to calculate. "But you'll be embarking in September! In that case I suppose we should plan to have the party the second or third week of August" It appeared she had already forgotten her anxiety, although it was so obvious, about Enoch's safety. "Well have a saxophone and some strings," she concluded confidently. "And the piano, of course."

I reiterated—looking through the screen of rain—that I had no one to invite.

"No one to invite!" my mother scoffed. "Don't worry about the guests. I shall ask them for you." And with unexpected vitality she threw off her dressing-gown and leaped into the downpour. In a moment her arms and hair were streaming; an eddy spun in the bow of her lip. "In the future I'll have cactus," she said, ripping the desiccated leaves from their stalks, "and cactus only! And if I take in a pet, it's to be a camel! I feel like a Bedouin come to an oasis!" she shouted, and gargled the rain that rushed from the awning. Barefoot, she stood with her long thighs apart, wetly skeined, and her face welcoming the deluge, like a nereid in a pre-Raphaelite painting, or one of those fountain-nymphs from whose mouths a pillar of water, full of the mystery of flow and return, ascends.

In a few days the terrace had become a lake, with carpenters sloshing through it, carrying try squares—my mother had decided that a small dais should be built at the end of one room to accommodate the musicians. "Otherwise they'll be under/o‹," she insisted, snuffling: she had caught cold. She trotted about wrapped in a woolen shawl smelling of camphor. At length her sneezes gave way to coughs, and her coughs undertook to resemble the sound of a ragged bellows emerging from some remote area in her interior. But she would not go to bed. She looked out at the rain resentfully, as though it had purposefully done her an injustice, and went on wheezing instructions. Maids, florists, saxophonists, and pastry-bakers paraded through the lake to be interviewed and waded out rejected. My mother was fastidious: she shivered, and no one could satisfy her visions. Plainly, it was all to be a spectacle—she planned embankments of flowers, a whole heaven of colored lanterns, bowers of ice cream, antiquated syncopations. It was to be very like the coming-out party of her own girlhood, which had miscarried—the invitations withdrawn in anger and shame (the former hers, the latter her parents'). "They said I had to choose between capital-P Party and small-p party," she reminisced hoarsely, while the rain and the carpenters' hammers continued to drum, sometimes in one voice, sometimes fugue-like, through the house. Half-sick and hallucinated, she was about to succumb to what had never taken place. She blew her nose and coughed, and wandered about with streamers of tears escaping her round lids; and her special little snort, preceding her down a hallway, made the hammers beat faster, and the rug-men roll, and the polishing-machines race in circles, and the doors fly from their hinges. Only the rain could not be frightened into a display of conscience: it came down wearily, systematically, reservedly, meticulously, and ladled whirlpools into the lake on the terrace.

I tried on the gold and silver gown. My mother held her handkerchief to her chin and struggled with what promised to be a violent exhalation: instead it was only a gasp. "Everything looks better in Paris," she scraped out, surveying my figure. "I suppose it's their light."

"You don't think I'll do?"

"Perhaps under the lanterns," she equivocated. Her meditative glower alarmed me: it was indirect; it was queer.

"What's the matter?"

"Fm afraid I made a mistake. I don't like you in those metallic colors."

"They don't become me then?" I said, appealing to the mirror.

"Oh, they become you. It isn't that. And the fit is very nice, you know. It's only—" she hesitated scrupulously—"you look as though you're dressed up in money."

"You mean I advertise you."

"No," she said pensively, "not me."

"I can't help it," I murmured, "if I look like cold cash."

My mother rasped privately into her cloth. "You look like your father," she ventured at last.

It was the first time in months she had spoken of him; she cast her head regretfully aside, as though the gesture could erase the smudge of sound from the air. But I continued to hear it; her words hovered tangibly near, like winged insects, prowling and skimming; and the dress she had brought for me singed my skin with a blaze of gold and silver, the hot gold of my father's beach and the burning silver of his sea.

I wore it. I wore it while the little orchestra assembled, and the violins, tuning up, quarreled with one another; I wore it while the guests and their umbrellas came jollying through the door in bunches, like complicated domes of cabbage, dropping shining puddles on the glazed ball-floor; I wore it all that while. And then the dancing began, and at once and pleasurably and plausibly the moon bloomed behind a trellis of corpse-thin clouds, like an old skull working itself out of a grave, and a certain smell steamed up from the river, and at that moment the long flood ended. And still I wore that gown, silver and gold, lust-bringing, redolent not of wealth (which I knew to be capacious, freeing, salubrious, like air or water) but merely of money—small money, cheap and bad money, beggar's money. And he, brought on by my mother's look, which could conjure but never exorcise, he wore it with me, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: when I glittered it was with his greed, and when, on the other hand, standing quite still that I might subdue the flash and clink, I tried to dissemble dullness, it was with his cunning and his guile. But he was with me, and all around me; he clung; he was the terrorist guest at my mother's party.

For it
was
her party, although ostensibly it was mine; it was plainly hers despite the swaying of the Bon Voyage banner among those Oriental lanterns. Everything had taken place exactly as she had foreseen. All the rooms had become one room, and butlers slid here and there dumbly offering canapes; the bar was very discreet. It was a gallant scene, albeit a little soiled with romantic overuse, and I felt that the dancers, who composed themselves too decorously, as for a pointillist picture in a suburban dinette, knew it: even the musicians were uneasy with their worn dogmatic tunes evoking nothing, and their jittery short chords and dated trios, and a kind of dissatisfaction, or perhaps merely impatience, sighed through their playing.

I went upstairs to my mother. She was in bed with fever; she lay kneading the bedclothes and sweating angrily.

"What are you doing up here?"

"I came to see how you are."

"Go down, I hear a waltz."

"Are you all right?"

"I can't sleep, I'm sick. I'm fighting ghosts." She menaced me feebly. "Damn it, go down."

"I'll stay awhile if you want."

"No, your perfume is agonizing. I can't bear sweetness, I have ghosts in my head. Your rustling is killing me. Go down, damn it, go down."

The party was failing. There was laughter, but it belonged to arguments and mockery. The strangers ate, danced, drank. They did not know me, they did not care about my voyage, they did not believe in it: they sat on gilt-legged chairs wiggling their long black shoes and cursing the music.

I appealed to the saxophonist.

"Can't you get them to play something else?"

"Mrs. Vand gave us our program, miss."

"I don't like it. Do something else."

"We promised Mrs. Vand we'd follow her list exactly."