Part 19 (1/2)
”Tolstoy. So as not to offend him. He knows nothing about Literature-most great writers don't: all they know is life. Now ssh, what's this about philistinism?”
”Enoch, you're mean. Leave the boy alone.”
”He ought to be able to defend his opinions, Allegra.”
”Well, if you'd let him get a word in.”
”It's a mark of diplomacy not to. I thereby save him from himself. Watch and see, he'll tell us the East is effete.”
”It is,” said McGovern.
”And decadent.”
”Right,” said McGovern.
”And tied to outmoded forms.”
”I don't deny it.”
”And under the thumb of the academic critics?”
”Absolutely.”
By this time McGovern was viewing my stepfather with positive enthusiasm.
”Well, don't let Mrs. Vand hear you say all that, or she'll cut you out of her will.”
”Enoch!” protested my mother. ”I'm the one who's the real revolutionary-you can see it just on the face of things. I never print anything that doesn't have symbols, or an objective correlative at least, or tension between images, and things like that! I just said I can't stand formalism-”
”Exactly,” said Enoch. ”That proves it. You're effete, decadent, outmoded, and academic.”
”I am not!” She appealed to her editor: ”Am I, Eddie?”
”Is she, Eddie? There's a moral choice for you! Before answering, consider carefully the benefits of literary philanthropy.”
”I already have,” McGovern responded promptly, entrusting to my stepfather a tone both of solidarity and admiration.
”Well, am I?” she whimpered.
”Mrs. Vand,” said McGovern, ”you are the most avant-garde person I have ever encountered.”
My mother giggled.
”An art pioneer,” Enoch recommended.
”Certainly an art pioneer,” McGovern conceded.
”Then why are you always arguing about the capital letters?” she demanded.
”I won't any more,” he modestly promised. ”Ora et labora.”
”What?”
”Pray and work,” McGovern said, folding the check in tres partes like conquered Gaul. It slid with the expertness of familiar surrender into the side pocket of his jeans, which publicized a ritual poverty as fastidiously and formally as a friar's rope-belt. ”It's a motto to remember me by.”
”You'd better come back or you'll have it for an epitaph. No later than next week, I'm warning you.”
”On the stroke of thirteen minutes after three P.M.- That's when Albert Schweitzer takes his afternoon nap, you know.”
”One of the philistines?” Enoch inquired.
”The greatest of them all,” McGovern answered.
”Sound chap,” said Enoch, when the door had closed. ”Think how lucky you are.”
”He has a very original temperament,” my mother remarked, gratified.
”I agree, and if it works to your advantage I doubt whether you'll ever see him again.”
”I just gave him a big advance!” she exclaimed, but with plenty of confidence. ”I just gave him, let me see...”
”Don't tell me. Please don't I can't bear to hear money getting counted.”
”That's because you've never had any to count,” my mother said aloofly; her rapid look of scorn fell unexpectedly and brutally upon me. ”Don't you have anything better to do than hover?”
”I'm not hovering,” I objected.
”Then what do you call what you've been doing for the last half-hour?”
So she dismissed me; and because I did not know where she expected me to go, or what-aside from my concealing an attentive curiosity behind a false patience-she expected me to do, I went quietly out to the terrace, on the theory that it was the only part of the house that was at the same time outside of the house. It gave me the sense of hanging over the city (despite the cactus and the affectation of garden furniture and the anti-suicidal design of the railing) on the thinnest of wafers. Out there I might with justification be accused of hovering; but a fog of guilt hovered with me, and I wondered why. Then I knew, or almost knew: it was a ledge like that other ledge of my unredeemed childhood, a natural platform for one who is part of the scene and is at the same time outside of the scene-the habitat, in short, of an eavesdropper. And my mother and her husband devised scenes; they invested every conversation with a Doppelganger; they seemed to speak of an absent being even when they spoke only of themselves. In their most innocent discussions I felt myself an intruder whom they wished away as smoke is wished away with the wave of an ineffectual and wandless hand; but smoke distends itself and vanishes, or else has a chimney to go up into. I had not even that. Hence they thought me less substantial than smoke or imagination, and only noticed me when I got in the way of their other, their constant, listener, the ghost of their joint aspiration (or to be still more accurate, Enoch's aspiration which my mother, convinced she knew its nature, shared), to whom they addressed everything, even when they appeared to be addressing only themselves, even when they might have been supposed merely to be attending to the claims of subordinates and servants. This romance-whatever wraith-of-the-future it was that had won Enoch's concentration and my mother's allegiance-crowned whoever stood between them: for its sake my mother had to cause even her editor to acknowledge my stepfather's elevation; for its sake she had, long ago, to wreak upon my governess the news of Enoch's grace; and to succor, for the sake of its nameless name, the private visitor's dangerous laugh of avarice. On account of this secret romance-how foolish that phrase is, yet it correctly describes their betrothal to my stepfather's destiny, another foolish yet relentless and exact phrase-they sold everything and everyone for smoke. Not myself but smoke they were sending to that homme de genie, my evil-genius father, that Tilbeck who rose from murk like a half-forgotten creature of the strait to claim his tribute (I was educated enough in myth to know that in every tale of this sort it is a daughter who is taken to feed the slime) ; and anyhow what harm could come to smoke? They trusted in my unimportance, and meant me to trust in the same. Not that I had fear: I only had surprise. Without a concrete shock, it never occurs to us that we really do not matter. And we do not.
The terrace was like that long-ago ledge: a wafer in the air on which one acc.u.mulates reality.
I had not had much more than a moment to consider these echoes and matters new and rehea.r.s.ed before Enoch arrived and put Anna Karenina in my lap. ”I think we've had enough of this. Keep it, if you like.”
”All right,” I said.
”You might take it with you.”
”I've read it twice. Anyhow I suppose he'll have something to read there, won't he? It's not a desert island.”
”Ah, then don't expect treasure!”
”I suppose he's literate, after all.”
He peered evasively over the rooftops facing us and the crowded river, showing himself to be too diverted by the bright day to reply. ”Your mother won't get out of bed,” he said finally. ”She's being self-conscious about her hair, actually. It's a bit of a vanity, but I imagine it is a hards.h.i.+p for her.”
”She didn't send you out here to apologize for that hovering business?”
”No.”