Part 30 (1/2)

Everything had happened long before.

”No one likes to dredge things up,” William said. ”I can't condemn your mother if she doesn't want to.”

”You don't want to either.”

”I don't want to either.”

”You're sorry to see me here.”

”Sorry.”

”And surprised,” I persisted.

But this stopped him. ”Surprised? Oh no no no no, not surprised.” Wearily he put his fingers across his lids, contemplating me through them as through the bars of a jail. ”The fact is”-and now slowly, very slowly, wearily and slowly, phrase by phrase he brought it out-”I've been expecting you on this very errand for twenty years.”

For twenty years. So I was right: everything had happened long before. And perhaps I was predictable to William only because in some way my movements had been predetermined. The notion amazed me, and I waited to hear if he would confirm it.

From the imprisonment of his spread hands he said, ”We live with possibilities, but mostly we live with consequences”; and confirmed it.

But it was not what Enoch would have said. Enoch, wizard-like, would have seen consequences as possibilities. My stepfather was a magician however. William was more practical; and was it not just for his practicality that I had sought him out?

So in the same vein, practical and sober, I put it to him: ”But all the while I've been in the dark, and when you're in the dark it's nothing but a question of grasping at straws. It all comes down to that. And you,” I told him, ”are the last one left”

”Your last straw?” he echoed reflectively.

”When you don't know what's happened-when you're in the dark and you can't tell the difference,” I pursued, ”between a possibility and a consequence.”

He was thoughtful. ”You're intelligent,” he said, ”you're acute,” and let it momentarily hang. I wished, in the interval, that instead of these he had merely called me innocent, but his hesitation had ended. ”So you won't be distressed to remember that the last straw is exactly the one reputed to have broken the camel's back. And if I'm your last straw”-he looked at me shrewdly, lowering his protective fingers-”are you altogether prepared for that?”

I felt the involuntary rip of shock. ”What do you mean?”-though I saw his deliberation.

”Yes,” he said in a low hard formal tone, ”if you have come here, if you have come to me, that is what you have come for.”

”If I've come-” I began, but William did not allow me either crescendo or conclusion, and whatever my cry was to have been, protest or exhortation or plea, it fell away like a flake of cinder into that past time where truth was interned side by side with betrayal and death.

He cut me off-”Never mind”-and undertook to murder possibility with consequence. I mean by this that (like a missionary) he explained his intention and robbed my life of its axioms. ”And now,” he said, without haste, oratorically (like a missionary he was about to convert me, and did), ”at your own request, if you please-at your own request”-he strangely emphasized this, as if to show how he abhorred forcible conversion, showing me instead the whole pale force of his round bright pupils, ”I am going to break your back.”

He did as he said. He did what every trader or missionary will do for a customer or convert when he expects to be well paid for it. In my cognition of William at that queer moment, trader and missionary appeared to coalesce theatrically-a twinning of vision unremarkable when you think of those altogether respectable Societies for the Propagation Of this or that faith which, behind the counters of their sleek and tidy shops on fas.h.i.+onable streets, will sell you religious articles or scriptural keys out of zeal for your eternal soul, but always collecting a good sum for the privilege of bringing you to the truth, as though their particularized and immediately vendable truth had, like pistols, a cash value. It was, in my mother's lawyer, an unexpected savagery. But had not his son, an hour before, been equally savage?-and then I had marveled at it, it had fallen across my perception with all the turbulence of a rough beauty, a sort of fantasy of manner, an intricate secret elegance, like the incalculable path of a spring happened upon in an otherwise orderly countryside by a party of unsuspecting tourists. It was nothing I could ever have guessed at; it was something to stumble over, both in the father and in the son-in the father especially, the countryside of whose face had always raised its contours in fine ruddy hillocks more melancholy and quiescent, as in a pastoral, than violent. But in the father I did not like that startling streak and rush. It oppressed, it cut through the design of his voice as though it wished to persecute; it hurt. Against the unreality of the masked dusk-light William ministerially raised a hand; the blazing translucence of the little webs of skin linking the roots of finger to finger frightened me: I was vulnerable even to that terrible vulnerability and delicacy of his thinnest flesh. -A breeze jangled the metal slats of the blind, and lifted it away; and through the triangle of window suddenly revealed I saw the sky s.h.i.+ning like a polished copper gong. Immensely and hopelessly it seemed to toll in the far commanding firmament, a high clear signal of the marketplace, and below it William and I, tented in that silken room, tugged for a bargain in our inevitable exchange. He had received me into that privacy knowing me for what I was, a suppliant after truth; and he intended to give it to me-for a price. He did not mean to outwit me, only to exact from me his price. I looked: it was posted on his brow, plain to see-he meant'it to be plain, he meant to have me see him in the guise of merciless collector. The cost of truth was my surrender. I would be indentured now to exile-I had to barter my freedom for the truth, and yield without a word. And I took in these lucid implications soon enough; they were familiar, they were close. It was the same surrender of myself which had bought for my mother, in all the ceremony of mystery, my stepfather's safety. -But now (just as the father had been annihilated by the son's tale) the mystery would be annihilated by the father's tale.

The errant window-shade, maneuvered by a contrary sheet of air, fell back aslant, and covered the gleam of sky. Between its bottom slat and the sill the round s.p.a.ce of gong reduced itself to a golden hoop-the whole diffuse brilliance of that sky was concentrated into an intense circle spinning against the panes: it was the coin of sun, suspended in the valley of skysc.r.a.pers, about to drop away, as into a slot. And I, counting up the two clean sea-stained dimes fixed in William's seizing eyes, wished to slide down into that dark shaft with the vanis.h.i.+ng afternoon, to roll with my humiliation out of sight: I was stunned by coins, coldly felt them all around me, in the unendurable disc of the hanged sun and in William's burning face and in the round round moons of my fingernails, and remembering my lewdly clinking dress (that dress which had made me ashamed to look with innocence upon William's son), jingling like a peddler's pockets, full of money, full of Tilbeck, full of noisy contemptible actuality-oh then, then, then, even before William (despoiled, my almost-father) spoke it out to me I knew what I was, what unspeakable mint had made me, and how like a piece of unclean money I could be pa.s.sed from hand to hand, one day to pay for this, and the next for that, and to be bitten between cruel cynical teeth testing for the counterfeit.

So the transaction in that office was concluded. William gave me the truth, and I paid for it.

He said: ”Now I am going to talk to you of your legal status and I will be obliged to use a set of legal terms. They will seem brutal,' but they are what they mean. I trust you will accept them without commotion. They are what you will have to face. Afterward, if you wish-I suppose you will-we'll talk of their history. But first you will have to face what you have come for. You ask me about your father. But you ought also to ask about your mother. Your poor mother,” he repeated, and it was wondrous that he did not falter-”the fact is that in the eyes of the law-and I am please understand a lawyer talking about the law” (but at this small point he faltered at last, and allowed a low phlegm-noise to be juggled in his throat, and then took up again) ”-you are what is called illegitimate issue. You are,” he finished, driving in with all unmistakable clarity his deep and iron nail, ”a b.a.s.t.a.r.d.”

6.

The father's tale.

Once, long ago, on an occasion I have by now forgotten, Enoch said to my mother: ”h.e.l.l is truth seen too late,” and without giving it any thought I a.s.sumed he was speaking for himself. But my mother, shrewd and shrewish that day, said petulantly: ”And what about truth seen too soon? You're not going to tell me that's heaven?”-And afterward I came up on my stepfather's remark in a book: it was a sentence from an English philosopher. He had been reading Hobbes. But his reply to his wife was characteristic only of himself-he answered not with a logical corollary but with a fresh tangent. ”Oh no,” he told her, propelled into one of his placid satiric moods, ”Heaven is never to see the truth at all.” And then, to mollify her-she had taken it roughly against the s.h.i.+eld of her frown-he threw out, ”if you see the truth too soon you naturally accommodate yourself to what you see; and by the act of accommodating yourself you change whatever the circ.u.mstance was when you originally saw it; and by changing the circ.u.mstance you alter the ground from which the truth springs, and then it can no longer grow out that same truth which you foresaw: it has become something different. So you see it is impossible to see the truth too soon, for when its moment of commitment arrives, it has changed its nature and it is already too late. The truth is always seen too late. That is why h.e.l.l is always with us,” he insisted on finis.h.i.+ng, although my mother had long ago covered her ears and was shouting with vigor, ”Stop! Stop! I can't stand it, I won't stand it!” And they ended laughing together, enigmatically, as though not the English philosopher, and not Enoch, but Allegra Vand herself had innocently convulsed them.

I think of this now, when I have come finally to the father's tale, though not my father's: a tale told by my almost-father about my ”true” father, signifying anything but fatherhood. For if, in my stepfather's phrase, it was for me a truth seen too late, that story which William eventually related, then let it stand that on a certain afternoon in the first days of September, in William's darkly glazed private office, under the painted eye of his brief father-in-law and the paper eye of his determinedly permanent wife, I entered h.e.l.l.

My observation upon arrival? Chiefly, that the place felt familiar. In what respect? In this: that to enter h.e.l.l and find Tilbeck there was no surprise.

William, who had deliberately denuded my mother's file of everything important, had access to the devil's own dossier. And there were stored and stuffed all those missing papers in the matter of Allegra Vand which William's son had vainly coveted, to redeem, I suppose, his sense of historical order-not a petty but a moral sense: for William's son, in his zeal for personal history, appeared to invest a proper chronology with morality, to wit, ”that is good which follows”; and one day, when he would have learned to transpose this uninteresting notion into a more politic one, viz., ”that which follows is good,” he would indubitably grow into an even cleverer lawyer than his father-”that which follows is good” being a dictum of complete legal probity, especially when applied as heading to a doc.u.ment full of brilliantly concealed tax crimes. But this is digression, though purposeful. Only yesterday my stepfather had defined history as a judgment on humanity; today William's son saw it as a compilation of the appropriate papers. As for William himself, his relation with history lay in his not having any. How was this possible in a mind concerned most of its sentient hours with the law, where presumably precedent governs? But precedent did not govern William's mind, for precedents are only relative, and contradict one another now and then, and anyhow William was a Calvinist, and believed in the foreordained: call it, for brevity's sake, destiny. Destiny is individual, and what has gone before, in similar cases (no matter how similar to, or, as lawyers like zoologically to put it, however truly ”on all fours with,” the case at hand), is irrelevant. To William, the circ.u.mstances of my birth-how indecently priggish and d.i.c.kensian that sounds! yet I succ.u.mb to this mean phrase out of deference for poor William, who, after showing so much respect initially for the precise terminology and taxonomy of his profession, reverted with relief to another show of respect, which he expressed insultingly in circ.u.mlocution and euphemism-the circ.u.mstances of my birth, at any rate, implied for him not simple event but a destiny for which I was responsible in the first place and to blame in the second. And not only a destiny, but even a breed of soul which such a destiny might sp.a.w.n. Those ”circ.u.mstances,” moreover, explained his aversion and clarified his evasions; and all delicately and exquisitely and secretly they gave me a sinister chill, as though, while standing solemnly in court, about to be sentenced, I had caught sight of the G.o.d Pan at the window, clutching a bunch of wild flowers, h.e.l.lebore and jewelweed, and laughing a long and careless jingle of a laugh, like bicycle bells.

So it turned out that-as I have stated-it was the devil's dossier which contained the missing papers. At the same time let it be noted that the devil's dossier was altogether empty. A paradox? No. The papers were missing because they were non-existent. That is the way it is with the devil's file-it is full of lies, and lies, in an absolute sense, have no reality, body, weight, or substance. Lies, being what-is-not, are not there. There were no doc.u.ments recording my mother's divorce from Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck because there had never been a divorce. There had never been a divorce because there had never been a marriage. If lies had reality, body, weight, or substance, there would not be room enough anywhere to keep them in, and the devil would have to appropriate the whole world for a safety-vault.

To this, Enoch-I can hear him!-would say: ”Exactly. He has appropriated the world, just as you say. Why else is the world so stuffed with lies? The liars are all file-cabinets for the devil.” Regarding all plain contrary-to-fact falsehoods perhaps this is so, but it is not so with the lie that is a lie only because the truth has not been uttered. The lie of omission, like the silent hollow within the flute's facile cylinder, cannot be put away, and will continue to plague the universe forever, by virtue of its formlessness, which is dependent on honest forms. An ordinary lie, because it is a simple opposite of what-is, can be contradicted by exposure of its contrary. But the lie of omission is a concealment contradicted by nothing, and bolstered, in fact, by the solidity of the revealed. That Tilbeck existed, I had been told; that he was my father, I had been told. From this I drew the a.s.sumption of a marriage; but it was an appearance: a nefarious illusion, worse than a made lie. Rumor and murmur come to kill a made lie; the made lie is tangible and can be cut down. But the omitted pertinent thing, the lie of illusion, falls like a damp pervading smoke. It was by illusion and trick my mother and William had snared me. And Enoch, who had been quiet, who had said nothing, had thereby had his part in it, and was a liar like the others: though a hater of liars.

William began: ”The circ.u.mstances of your birth-”

”My illegitimacy.”

”-of your birth have turned out to be highly useful to a particular individual.”

”You mean to my father. Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. Don't think I don't know all my father's names!”

If this was a challenge William did not rise to it, and only said, ”In spite of that you have been protected from the beginning.”

I said: ”I wish I had been protected from beginning.”

”Sophistry. I don't hide it from you that I regard it as a great pity.”

”A pity that I was born.”

”I refer only to your mother's behavior.”

”My mother's misbehavior.”

”I think you had better take a more serious att.i.tude,” William said.

”A more humble one, do you mean? Befitting my position in life?”

”Please,” he said harshly.

”I believe I'm not going to weep.”

”Excellent. I'm glad of it. I ask you to be serious, but not irresponsible.”

”In other words, not to take after my mother. But I've been better brought up. I haven't been anyone's mistress,” I told him, and added guilefully: ”So far.”

”I also ask you to speak of your mother with”-anxiously he chose the less obvious word-”propriety. I hope it won't be necessary to warn you against bad taste in this matter.”

His gravity was both intense and fastidious, and therefore so absurd and piteous that, despite my declaration, I almost wept after all. I came so close to it that I laughed instead, and was surprised: what emerged was bitter shame. ”And to think,” I brought out, ”I always imagined the divorce itself was the thing in bad taste!”