Part 5 (2/2)

He laughed slightly. ”I want to apologize, you know. For that business about the check. I expect I made Mrs. Vand out for a criminal.”

”Or yourself for a prosecutor,” I suggested. ”Forget it.”

”Look,” he began, ”my father told me about that money.”

My mouth went suddenly dry. I let the silence gather; I had nothing to say.

”h.e.l.lo?” said William's son.

”I'm here. Yes,” I said.

”The money,” he persisted. ”I found out where it's going.”

”Your father's too discreet,” I demurred, ”to have told.”

”He didn't want to. In fact he refused to.”

”But in the end he did.”

”He was awfully reluctant.”

”He did though.”

”I'm afraid I badgered him into it. He broke down finally.”

”He's not like that,” I said apprehensively. ”He doesn't give in.”

”I never thought so myself. But that's neither here nor there.” His thick cautious breathing crackled like static in the wire. ”It's strange. You know she's been sending it for years to a place on Town Island. It's for the upkeep of an old estate.”

I echoed him without understanding. ”An estate?”

But he disbelieved in my ignorance. He said suspiciously, ”Your mother's property. Your grandfather's place. Where she was brought up.”

”My mother has no such property,” I objected.

”My father told me,” he said, settling it. ”It's a sort of museum now.”

”A museum?” I said in the same tone.

”Oh, it's not in actual operation. It never really was. Part of your mother's trust money was earmarked for it. The trustee was supposed to set it up. Look,” he interrupted himself impatiently, ”you know all this, don't you?”

”I never heard of it,” I said truthfully.

But the guilty static which continued to measure out his hesitation was an accusation. ”You know it all,” he declared, and carried on. ”It was supposed to be a museum, but the thing got managed badly. The money's for a caretaker they have now and again. He goes out there every once in a while to clear away the brush and start up the plumbing. The chimney's fallen. There are weeds growing up through the kitchen floor. The place is a ruin.”

I pondered and was still; between us the wire soughed.

”And it used to be worth a hundred thousand dollars,” said William's son.

”William told you that?”

”I tell you he told me all of it.”

”All of it,” I repeated doubtfully, docilely (”all” was Tilbeck, Tilbeck was all), and in an instant, by a clairvoyant inspiration, in a vision of sympathetic comprehension, I was certain that William had told none of it.

Nevertheless I went along with it. I rounded it out. ”Did he say what sort of a museum it was going to be?”

”He said a museum, that's all. According to the terms of the trust.”

The terms of the trust: this already familiar phrase, humming with threats, now hung before me brilliantly, as though freighted with imagination. At that moment I thought William wonderful. William as fabricator and fabulist, William as author of a ruse! ”They show the skeletons of whales,” I triumphantly supplied. ”And species of shrimp, in green bottles. A marine museum,” I exclaimed, elated by perception, elated by invention.

”I knew you knew!” said William's son.

Privately I regarded it as fantastic that my imbrication upon William's construction, conceived in irony (it was my father I saw as a marine creature), should touch on the actual with all the delicate tenacity of a bivalve rooted in the shallows. A museum: and then, behold, I had made of it a marine museum-a thing not unlikely, for I had heard how my grandfather Huntingdon had furrowed through all the world's waters, a seafarer upon the luxury decks of ocean liners, and how, moreover, he had steamed eastward as far as the Indies to buy my mother's and William's wedding-present. Well then, a marine museum! And why not?-and ”I knew you knew,” William's son said again. ”It's how I got him to tell. I said I'd get it out of you if he wouldn't He didn't want that!”

William would hardly want that, thought I, since the tale William had given his son was no tale I knew. ”I'm not easy to get things out of,” was all I said-though fleetingly I speculated on just such a scene: William's son persuading, myself unyielding but secret in the chance joy of watching him persuade: the stern but remarkable bone of his nose and the imaginary helmet being all his means while all my admiration. I should not have objected to such persuasion, and I deviated sadly into a fresh summoning of his ”encore un peu,” murmured on the terrace into a yielding ear that had no French, but had the round beauty of a wreath instead.

”Neither is my father,” he pursued, and, while I wondered-”easy to get things out of, I mean. Because he's in them.”

”In what?”

”In things.” He gave a little cough that came through the filter like a far queer birdcall. ”He told me. Oh, he's in things, all right. I suppose you know it. He's involved is what I mean. I couldn't believe it. You know”-again the cry of the bird, cough or perhaps scanty laugh-”I always thought my father's nose was absolutely clean. Imagine, it's what I always thought. You always think that about your own father,” he concluded hoa.r.s.ely.

”Yes,” I said, ”you always do.”

”It's funny how you find things out.”

His smitten gravity called for a spectacularly original utterance. I changed ears nimbly. ”Eventually,” I observed, ”everything comes out into the open.”

He sounded positively chastened-the grand great buffalo with his head down, not for b.u.t.ting but for bathetic shame. ”It was awfully fine of you not to say anything the other night,” he burst out.

This puzzled me. ”When do you mean?”

”In front of Stefanie. I don't say she's derived from a band of angels herself, but it's nothing I'd want her father to know. Not right now, at any rate. It really mattered to me,” he wrung out gratefully. ”You were really fine.”

”Don't mention it,” I said in a parody of neutrality, and we talked a little more, until it became quite plain that he was not going to ask me to go to the movies with him, or anything in that line: so I hung up soon enough.

Meanwhile I smiled to myself. In what fabrication or tale of shady dealings the guileless William had implicated himself it was beyond me to guess. It was enough to know that, for the sake of my mother, he had put off his son: and he had put him off with a lie. And yet not really, if what he had said were to be taken as metaphor and not invention. For the museum on Town Island, looked after so a.s.siduously by my mother's checks, was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: and a man can be said to be a museum. Surely my father, const.i.tuting present evidence of a buried time, was a sort of museum-he housed matters which had to be dug after, collected bit by bit, and reconstructed. And William, as curator, had determined that the museum was to remain closed to the public, closed even to his son and prospective law partner. Whatever it was he guarded he must have considered either very horrible or very fragile-perhaps both, as, for instance, a shrunken head. He would do anything to prevent its exposure; he would even declare (if it might in some fas.h.i.+on appear helpful) that he was a headhunter himself.

But it made me hesitate. William as headhunter or trafficker in imprudence, William as liar, was unimaginable: here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they are always fict.i.tious. And yet he had defrauded his son of knowledge; what difference if it were the knowledge of evil? It was perhaps the first falsehood poor William had ever discharged in all his life. I could no longer regard him as incorruptible. The touch of greed carried far, it seemed; my father's touch carried far. It was not possible to conceal or elude it without defilement. I thought how money-l.u.s.t sp.a.w.ns deceit even among mere watchers or bystanders, and saw my father as owning some iron G.o.d or demon nourished by the taste of purity and panting after innocents with his long iron tongue, licking them to rust and corrosion at last. This was one of the creatures, neither legendary nor extinct nor caged, who roamed about the halls of that museum which William had fearfully closed to the public, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck's museum: the cost of the exhibit was too high, and the admission price was ferocious. What you paid was yourself. In order to get in you had to join the bad and dirty things on display: you had to change and be one of them. And William, who had entered and seen and learned how the rust of iron decays on the hands, and the rust of truth in the mouth, would not permit his son to enter, see, or team.

Though I pitied William, I continued to smile: in trying to preserve his son's illusions (that man was not depraved, that no Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck existed), he had pa.s.sed himself off for a cheat and a crook-and broke thereby the last illusion his son had retained in the world.

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