Part 17 (2/2)

11.

When we came home a cable from Enoch was waiting. My mother read it jubilantly. ”They've given him a promotion! I can hardly believe it!” Her tongue moved skilfully past the exact governmental phrase. ”They told him about it right after he finished outlining his report at Zurich!” She threw herself onto a ha.s.sock beside the foyer table and began to laugh. Her eyes were brilliant. ”I never expected it so soon! But it's astonis.h.i.+ng!”

”Does it mean he'll come and stay with us now?” I inquired.

”Oh no, he'll only get home now and then to see all these new Was.h.i.+ngton people. He's got to go all over Europe,” she crowed, sniffing the cablegram as though it were somehow perfumed with her desire.

”Then how is it different from the job he's got now?”

But she was exultant. ”Different! Oh, it's marvelously different; it's clean. In the first place it's with the State Department-look, don't bother me now,” she broke off, ”I've got to send an answer right away.” She pulled off her gloves and tossed them at the maid, who had only just returned from the family-visit to Toronto which my mother's absence had enforced. ”Paper, paper! Get me some paper, Janet. You should have managed to get back yesterday, I wrote you the s.h.i.+p was due today-look at the dust on that bannister! Oh, I knew they'd give it to him, they couldn't let him rot in that horror forever”-she sipped a breath of innocence, of detachment, of turning-from-evil-”I could feel how morbid it was making me...”

She wrote, under the heading of DARLING, as though this too were a sort of list: THE AIR IS CLEAR AT LAST CONGRATULATIONS GLORIOUS FUTURE AHEAD NO MORE CORPSES And when I said, ”I don't want to study piano, I want the violin,” she pressed with zeal upon her pencil point and added: SAFE Nor did she again question my safety in the world until a dozen years later, when Enoch stood at the doorway of his amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p and when, as its price, I was sent to my father's unknown doorway, the yellow, dank, and unknown doorway of Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck.

Part Three.

Brighton.

1.

I was sent, but not immediately. They delayed, my stepfather and his wife, they reposed, they h.o.a.rded quiet days. The crisis had secured my consent: I had said I would go: and this seemed enough for them. They settled into old-fas.h.i.+oned domestic scenes and sounds; rather too purposefully they ”relaxed,” and the long conspiratorial drone behind the closed door of my mother's room one morning turned out to contain nothing more of intrigue or cabal than Enoch reading aloud the haying chapter from Anna Karenina. ”How wonderful!” my mother exclaimed now and then. ”I'd like to do something like that, something oh, you know, just thoroughly physical.”

”Why not start with getting out of bed?” Enoch said.

”Oh you,” she mildly scolded. ”I don't feel like it yet. It's too soon.”

”Leverheim told you to get out of there last week.”

”Leverheim. What a fool. If he has any license at all it's a plumber's. Him and his pills, they'd choke a whale. They made my hair fall out. Look, it's coming out in chunks.”

”He told you not to worry.”

”It may take months to grow back thick again! Even he admits that. You don't expect me to walk around this way, do you?”

”I don't expect you to stay in bed either.”

”Why not? I like it here.”

”It's neurotic.”

”Good. I'm glad. It's a compliment to be called neurotic, especially by you. You never say anything psychoa.n.a.lytical.”

”But I'm always listening psychoa.n.a.lytically, and that's even better.”

”Well, it may be better for you, but it's not better for me. I can't stand not knowing what you think of me.”

”All right, I think you're neurotic. Now get out of bed.”

”Not until I look human.”

”It's not important to look it, it's important to be it.”

”Don't start talking that funny way again. You're starting again.”

”I only said-”

”An epigram. It's disgusting. I hate it. You said I'm not human. You think I'm a dog in the manger or something. You have an Aesop complex, you know that, Enoch?”

”Look,” he said, ”I thought you wanted to be read to.”

”I do, I'm listening. Go on. I love this scene, don't you? It makes me want to jump right out of bed and mow alongside some peasants.”

He sighed, but he went on. His voice briefly lifted before descending into murmur again, and soon my mother was regularly interrupting with little moans of joy and protest. They were full of play, she and he; they were full of peace and gossip and mutual disobedience and delight. Neither one of them had a thought beyond the other.

Nevertheless I was sometimes allowed to visit with them, since my mother no longer had the excuse of sedation to keep me away. Her head was turbaned grotesquely in a gold-and-white shawl patterned with the Taj Mahal. She was lively and restored. Though her cough was rare, her talk was not, and its familiar disconnected patter continued for long periods (but plainly not meant for me), and reached and roused even Enoch's stingy smile. He shone with uncomplicated good humor almost all the while: my mother was exaggeratedly querulous, therefore unconsciously witty-but not so clever as Enoch's response measured her. Perhaps he laughed-he, committed at least superficially to the utilitarian-because there was, for the moment, nothing more useful for him to do. The fact was that we were waiting.

For what? Tilbeck had specified that I was to come alone. This was the paternal command. I was not to be chauffeured or chaperoned into my father's mysteriously tardy jurisdiction: quite the opposite, he meant me to deliver myself up to him unaccompanied and free of home-snares, in the manner of Beauty returning, unguided and unguarded, to the terrible Beast. That is to say, I supposed this to be the manner he had in mind; what he had actually written, and more especially his way of writing it, was promptly made inaccessible. The letter had been briskly hidden: Enoch had locked it up in his desk almost at once, as though it were a sort of dangerous animal he was afraid to have roam within sight of its prey. And strangely, it was his wife, not me, whom he regarded as its prey.

So I loafed in my mother's room and, against their jokes and teasings, waited. After several days it somehow came clear that a dispute had thickened about the time they were to surrender me to Tilbeck. Our side appeared to want to put it off another month-until nearly October-until, I surmised, the Senate hearings had safely ended. ”It doesn't matter to me,” I told them once, although they had not asked me whether it did. ”After twenty-two years,” Enoch answered, ”he can afford another few weeks' delay. It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter,” he obscurely finished, ”to you.” And my mother, who had wept because she had meant me to be always free, listened to the joyous haying scene, thought jealously of the Emba.s.sy, and was quickly reconciled. But the final date was so nearly a compromise-in-the-middle that it was difficult to tell who had won-that is, who had had to give way. For no reason at all-or perhaps because at that time he was growing fatter every day-I a.s.sumed that Enoch had not troubled to resist the other's proposals: had not troubled over anything at all, in fact, and was simply ready to hand me over and be done with it. Now and again the book smacked shut in his lap and he fell back into his chair with his palms slapped down upon his two spread-apart thick thighs, absorbed in adoration of my mother's foolishness, looking like a sultan or grand vizier; and my mother's wildly-wrapped turban with its print of queer Indian scribbles over her suddenly balding head, leaking hank and scraggle, side by side with his neat damp ruddy crown, threw over the room an Oriental comic chaotic cast that startled them both into self-satisfaction. They had settled me; they had smoothed me away like a snag; they had negotiated me, for a time, out of their existence. Who had done the real negotiating, however, was soon apparent: twice in one week the letterhead of William's firm had pa.s.sed across my mother's knee-humped sheet, after which she spoke: ”Is the tenth of September all right with you?”-and did not stop for my reply. She fingered her forehead indifferently; she saved her pa.s.sion for herself. ”Now how am I supposed to know?” she counter-questioned when I wondered how long my banishment would be: ”Ask Enoch.”

But Enoch, who had no idea, mumbled: ”A week maybe?”

”A day or so,” my mother amended.

”A month or so?” I interpreted.

”Well, take a full suitcase, you never can tell,” she acknowledged ominously.

In short they would reveal nothing. They kept to themselves, and pitied one another for their predicament, whatever it might be: with nothing left over, neither wonder nor regard, for the fact of my exile: only, I suspected, relief. They were saved; I had saved them. They had put me between themselves and Tilbeck; this time money was not enough, money would not do, money was not what he wanted; he wanted me.

I decided to speak to William.

But first this happened: Ed McGovern telephoned and asked to see my mother.

”Good,” she said. ”Tell him to come. I want his opinion on Vronsky.” For two days she had been arguing with my stepfather about the characters in Anna Karenina: she was angry that Tolstoy had made Anna's lover feel ennui. ”It isn't sensible,” she said, all vague and pouting, ”it's rude. It's insolent.”

”You mean it's real,” Enoch said.

”Iall wouldn't have done it. First those silly asterisks”-my mother believed in literary ”frankness”; she owned an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, of course, a smuggler's copy, and had modeled her foreman's love scenes with Marianna after the gamekeeper's-”and then, practically right after the consummation, he's bored to death with her!”

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