Part 13 (1/2)

”It was a hall on New Oxford Street. And they did take someone in. It was Sparrs.”

”Sparrs! I forgot about Sparrs, you're absolutely right. He'd cut jigsaw puzzles out of a gross and a half of cardboard portraits on the Royal Children and hawked them in the lobby. He had them in cotton string-bags, all in pieces.”

”It wasn't for that they arrested him. It was for stealing. He made off with one of the chairs.”

”It wasn't a chair,” my mother said finally, nettled into speech by the plain error of it. ”It was a stool, the one he was using to yell from. He stood on top of this high stool, it was a kind of ladder, and bawled ”The Little Princesses Dismembered! Elizabeth Quartered Limb from Limb! Margaret's Torso Sawed in Two!” --And when the police came he simply ran off with the stool. I don't think he meant to take it.”

The private visitor praised indulgently, ”I've always admired that sort of retention. With a memory like that you can't lose the past no matter how hard you try, can you? Poor Sparrs, I'd forgotten all about him. -G.o.d, how we used to hate royalty in those days! But he was Old Philadelphia; his mother made him come home. I bet he hasn't been out of Philadelphia since.”

”They won't let him out of the country,” Enoch said. ”He's an Esperantist, one of their big men by now, but he isn't allowed to go to their overseas meetings. They won't give him a pa.s.sport.”

”On account of his hating royalty?” my mother said. ”What could please the State Department more? It's how they got started!-hating royalty.”

”If you'll change R to L,” Enoch said. ”-AH those old members.h.i.+ps...”

”Not the Chopin Freed Poland Society!”

”Conceivably even that.”

The private visitor whistled. ”Loyalty, that's very interesting; you can see I'm out of touch.” He went on shrewdly, ”You know all that sort of thing, don't you? I suppose it's your business to know. -In your position.”

”Oh! my position,” Enoch vaguely answered. ”I don't get near politics.”

”Well, if they won't let you out ... But they can't keep you from coming in again, can they?”

”No,” Enoch said, ”they can't.”

”In that case I might go back.”

”To America? You wouldn't!” my mother gasped.

”To keep in touch, why not? I like to go where I'm comfortable-”

”You were comfortable in Germany,” Enoch remarked.

”Ah, you've heard about that! But I had to get out-that was '38 or so. They said I was spying for the Communists. So I went to Prague.”

”Where somehow they got the notion you were spying for the Germans?”

”You are remarkably political.”

”They were none of them mistaken, I suppose.”

”A man has to make a living,” the visitor said mildly. ”You make yours; I make mine.”

”Certainly,” Enoch agreed. ”There's not a spot in Europe that couldn't use a piano-player during the war.”

”Clever mind, cold nature, that's an old story. Annie told me how unsympathetic you were.”

”Enoch had no room on his staff for her brother, and even if he'd had, they're centralized appointments,” my mother began to protest, ”Enoch doesn't have any say in them. These people ought to stay in their home countries anyway. Wherever you go you find all the wrong people in the wrong places. Europe's become a scramble.”

”True enough. From that point of view alone you owe me something,” the visitor pointed out. ”I'm a Displaced Person, after all, just like all the others. I wouldn't be surprised if your husband's got me somewhere in his books. I'm registered everywhere, they catalogue everything; just let him look in his lists-”

”You are not in my lists,” Enoch said.

(And faintly, from my mother: ”If only he were!”) ”You've got bad lists then.”

”Yes. Very bad.”

But the visitor did not see, did not shudder, did not know; and only said, ”When it's your business to have all that sort of information? When you've kept your finger on where I've been-”

”I've kept my finger on nothing,” Enoch said.

”Haven't you?”

Enoch tightened: ”I don't see that it's reasonable to go on. If it's all talk, and no conclusion ... It's too late for talk.”

”It's too late not to talk. Look at it that way,” the other said, seeming to cajole. ”I can't say you're very hospitable.”

”You're not exactly in the situation of a guest. At any rate our tenure here was over at noon-hospitality isn't ours to give.”

”Oh, let's not have a dismissal! Not quite like that; don't think of it. Throwing me out's not the thing. It's against conscience, especially against an Oriental conscience-a tooth for a tooth! I'm speaking of, well, you remember, that time after the parade-you know which parade: I mean the one in Brighton, you had that whole side of the face swollen, big as a balloon, it was a Sunday and no dentists-we didn't throw you out, did we? And we had only the one little room, cramped enough for two, all full of that greasy bed, and only a hotplate, and that nasty puking-”

”Oh, shut him up, Enoch, can't you!” my mother shrieked.

”-and still we put you in the bed and got you through it-how we figured out about that icebag!-and finally snow from the window-sill wrapped in my only pair of sound socks-”

”G.o.d Almighty, shut him up! He's got no right to bring up Brighton, has he?” The raindrops tottered against, the high sob of her lamentation; she groaned helplessly. ”You don't have to bring up Brighton!”

”My dear Mrs. Vand”-he barely hesitated-”I expect I have to bring up everything.”

No one answered him, so I thought it was all over then, the meeting, my mother's pleas and growls, all. A thread of rage, already too much used, dangled briefly in her throat without effect, until a sudden click of quiet cut it off. Were they afraid to answer him? Or were they even now surrendering with who knows what terrible mute sign? Someone walked across the room, walked pickingly and windingly: I recognized the croquet-tapping twitter of my mother's steep Parisian heels. Would she for an answer leave him planted there, the private visitor, abandoned where he sat among probable mounds of discarded stockings, and not a word to cry him down? ”The wind,” I heard her say, all quickly meek, ”how strong the wind's become, it's blowing half my things”; she was coming to the window. In the dusk of rain I felt safe enough, and wondered whether to retreat: but when her l.u.s.trous reaching arm slid out to pluck the curtain from the air, like a coward I slumped back and struggled to fold myself away at every inconvenient hinge. The curtain went on flapping dizzily, long yards of peac.o.c.ks and vines, while up and up she leaned after it. so that once, for a moment only, I saw the side of her cheek: it was raw and pressed with markings, as though she had squeezed her fingers brutally against it (meanwhile I remembered Anneke's cheek, furrowed at dawn); and then the peac.o.c.ks descended like a brown mask and covered her. She had caught hold at last, and began to pull the folds of cloth in to the sill almost too impatiently, her hands grasping at plumage while the wind worked and my mother worked, tugging with a Rapunzelian eagerness, as if a live reward would clamber in at the end, clinging to the curtain's tail; but at the end, when she had gathered it all into the room, there was only a fringe of cheap thick ta.s.sels. I heard a sound of rings drawn on a bar, and then the peac.o.c.ks fell against the panes as noiselessly as some gross dark membrane dropping downward. The mirror was all at once shut off; and the ceiling, and the ticking bulbs. I could see nothing now; my bit of ledge grew black; my mother had fastened the fabric across the window. It was a seal; it was distinctly a seal. Or perhaps, more simply, it was merely time she wanted, a delay, knowing what would follow. But the lid was drawn down and hooked, and the clouds driven from the room and made to swim in their own night, and every snooping stir of air defied. She was out for privacy. It was not time she wanted then, time being of no possible use. On my blackened ledge, in the stinging slant of rain, I felt the uselessness of time. Time was tedium, time was talk. They talked like dancers in a figure seen too close: the pattern was obscured by approaches and digressions, by chase and retreat: by plain dead repet.i.tious goalless tedium. And so once more my mother's step went drumming over the floorboards: windingly and pickingly. She had drawn the curtain and sealed in time, although, knowing what would follow, it could do her no good. Nevertheless she delivered herself of the gesture, and immediately afterward delivered herself up to Enoch.

To Enoch; to Enoch only; for who but my stepfather might understand that language of her pantomime, the drawing of the curtain? She drew it not against spies or witnesses-who could she sensibly suppose might crouch watching on the ledge beneath her, what sinister fool would ride the sky to hear? But she drew it anyhow, simultaneously leas.h.i.+ng the peac.o.c.ks printed on the fabric and her bewildered image of the bird of the world; she leashed them both. The curtain strained from hook to hook, an inviolable tissue. It was quite as though she had pulled her crescent eyelids down, standing in the middle of that ambushed room with ruthless fingers daggering her cheek; the stigma of her rings stood in her flesh. Her husband was there; and the stranger who was no stranger; and at their feet the bird of the world, slaughtered.

And at last: ”Give him what he wants,” my mother said.

But the other man demurred, ”You don't have to be ashamed.”

”The wind,” she said, ”blowing all my things-”

”You don't need to hide,” he comforted without pity.

”It was the wind,” she said again, ”and the curtain went wild.”

And Enoch then: ”There's nothing else to do, don't you see, Allegra, there's nothing else to do; let's go ahead,” he said, but it was not the voice that spoke his lists, ”we'll go ahead and get it over with,” he said, ”there's nothing else to do.”