Part 35 (1/2)

”Nick thinks writing a novel is simply a matter of burning to do it. But not for sensible reasons, like wanting to get famous; it has to be a burning you can't imagine the cause of. Like a mysterious heartburn, and you haven't eaten anything bad.”

”If it's only a question of burning-”

”It's only a question of burning,” she vividly a.s.sented.

”Burn here,” he said.

”Oh, don't start that again! I'm going back, I thought we settled it.” Her laughter judged him ludicrous; in its minutest vibration he felt the current of his own despair. ”The point is Nick means to read all the bits and pieces so far, and help me get perspective. I couldn't do it without him, don't you see? If I tried to do it here, I'd burn all right!-I'd burn the ma.n.u.script!” she bleated, high-frequencied and absolute and all at once in earnest: ”Because he sees how to utilize the given-that's not just myself saying it, it's how Enoch characterizes him: he embroiders axioms and pragmatizes artistry-isn't that interesting? He distributes, he popularizes. Also he makes merry.”

”I suppose you mean by that that he drinks.”

”He drinks in. Oh look, he knows how to experience things! You can tell just by die turn of his eye: a sort of lazy but discreet eye. And the fact is n.o.body thought he'd stay when Hugh brought him up. Anyway Enoch didn't. Enoch said he was just a looker, he'd look and go. Which is what happened,” she insisted, ”in spite of his being a friend of Hugh's. Enoch said he didn't have Hugh's motivations. -Enoch's always talking about the motivations of the American Negro; it's one of his topics. But the second time he stayed.”

”Having acquired motivation,” William intervened.

”Call it what you want, I don't care. You never used to be so cynical, William. The whole point is he got to asking a lot of questions, about how the Movement got hold of the estate and so on, and he ended up interested.”

”In the Movement or in the estate?”

”Well, in me! In Marianna Harlow. Because I told him about all the notebooks I left behind in order to come up there. I told him I had to come anyhow, out of socialist principle, even though the whole place used to depress me when I lived there before. I never meant to go back to it for anything in the world. The way it used to throw me in a mood-”

”You told him a lot,” William observed.

”Well?”-She waited belligerently.

”You ought to show some reserve, Allegra.”

”Oh reserve! Federal Reserve! You think I'm some sort of bank, I ought to be kept locked up all the time. I'm not a bank! I told you, I'm flesh and blood!”

”Flesh and blood,” he repeated obediently, like a litany.

”Well yes, flesh and blood,” she sing-songed back at him, to press her mockery. ”-Like most people.”

”You are not like most people,” William said.

But she would not let him go on. She was afraid he would talk of the trust. ”I am, I am! Yes I am. I'm exactly like everyone else up there, all that heiress business doesn't make any difference to them. Not to them!”

”Not to Enoch? Not to Nick?”

”Not to anyone.” But she was evasive. ”Anyhow not to Nick. He asked me was it different up there-I said different than it used to be, and better; and Nick said he didn't think he'd mind it without the mob, all that s.p.a.ce and the feel of the bigness of everything; so then I told him why I came, I said the mob was the reason I came-”

”I thought it was socialist principle,” William reminded her. ”Or is that the same as saying mob?”

But she missed him conveniently. ”Without the mob it's a haunted house, that's all it is. I told Nick that. So of course he wanted to know haunted by what, but I didn't feel like saying, so all I said was capitalist greed, which is perfectly true anyway. Every brick someone else's underpaid sweat-”

”And the real ghost who does the real haunting?” he wondered blandly.

She hesitated; she fingered her collar. ”I don't know. An old copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson maybe. Maybe that.” She apprehended his puzzlement but purposefully ignored it; perhaps she was as puzzled herself. ”You know what Nick asked me?-Whether what I was writing was autobiographical or only about a sort of random fate, and if I was putting my father into it, and what my father was like, and where I lived before the camp got started; but he never asked about mama, though I told him she was the one who died first-”

”And what else? What else?”

”What do you mean, what else?” she said angrily.

”Did he ask how much you get a year?”

”Oh, fine, fine! You think he was smelling money, you're always suspicious without cause-but you see how wrong you are, William? He didn't even ask about you! It never entered his mind: who you are or what you are. Not even where you are, so you see? He isn't petty, he's large! Which is why he didn't want to stay. He told Enoch he despised all cells-molecular or political. Do you know that made Enoch like him right away?-I mean Nick doesn't go swallowing everything whole, like some of the ones we get. Some of them you can make believe anything. Tell them Friedrich Engels is a Chinaman, and they'll believe you; and afterward they're the first ones to beat it when you're getting together a floor-mop committee, or you have to send some pickets down to New York. First in the vanguard, last in the homeguard-that's what Enoch's always saying; he hates enthusiasm. He says it's the clearest sign of the gullible, and political revolution is no business for the gullible.”

”It certainly doesn't seem to interest anyone else,” William said.

”It interests me,” she a.s.sured him stoutly. ”And Enoch is the least gullible person ever created. You know what he told Nick? He said if he didn't like cells he'd better devise a way to get out of the Milky Way, since the whole planet is just a cell of the galaxy we're in. Then Nick said it wasn't the galaxy that bothered him, it was the rhythm of the surf-it got into his stomach and made it queasy. But Enoch told him that was perfectly all right and no obstacle, he could a.s.sign him to the scullery where he couldn't hear it over the pot-sc.r.a.ping. (We have an idiot who always burns the pots.) So then poor Nick looked cornered, and laughed, and said he didn't have a vocation for the Movement anyhow, and was against the workers because he was against work, and if he stayed at all it would be on account of the Empress of Russia.”

”Merciful Lord,” said surly William.

”He meant met” she jubilantly declared.

”Take it to heart, take it to heart. When the Czarina was surrounded by Marxists she was shot.”

”You twist everything. He simply offered to be my Rasputin, don't you see?-And help with Marianna! He was interested, don't you see? You know who Rasputin was? He helped the Empress with everything. If she'd had to do a novel he would have helped with that too. Don't you know about Rasputin, William?”

”A sorcerer,” he obliged. ”And the Czarina was his dupe.”

”Twist, twist! Nick hasn't asked for a penny, whatever you think.”

He conceded with a frown. ”Rasputins don't ask. It's not their method. They prefer you to ask them.”

”Ask them what?” said Allegra. But she was too impatient to pretend reasonableness; she thought him literal; she thought him stupid; she preferred the advance of her story to his qualifications and digressions. ”Never mind. You weren't there and you didn't see. Anyhow it was delicious; a victory: in jumps Hugh, and makes Nick admit he'd have to move in with the rest of us if he was really serious about being Rasputin. And you know what Enoch said after that? He said Hugh had pulled off a literary coup, because Omar Khayyam had met his Fitzgerald at last, though of course the a.n.a.logy wasn't exact-So then I absolutely kissed him, out of grat.i.tude.”

”Hum,” said William, figuring it out. ”Kissed Enoch?”

”Can you imagine anybody's kissing Enoch?”

”Kissed Nick,” he ventured then.

”Kissed Hugh! He's the one who persuaded Nick to stay, after all. And people don't go around kissing Rasputins. n.o.body ever accused the Czarina of that, did they?” she inquired pointedly. ”-Oh look, he's white, if you're wondering!-just because they're friends, Hugh and Nick ... You ought to see them together. You ought to see Nick. He has white-watery hair: a real blond. And fantastic eyes, oh unbelievable eyes-”

”Then you had better not believe them,” William advised, and would hear no more. The rest of the visit was financial. He agreed to release money for the coal delivery; he agreed to see about the bill for the blankets. The voice was the voice of Allegra, but the hand was the hand of the Youth Leader. ”If we had a really big refrigerator, you know the kind, a giant one like they have in hotels and restaurants and places like that, we could buy our meat in large quant.i.ties at one time, and get it wholesale, and save plenty of money.” So he agreed to this too, though it cost the equivalent of half a year's salary which might have been paid to the anxious young ichthyologist with the Armenian name-what a queer complaining letter the fellow had written! He said he was engaged, and spoke as though the marriage depended on the museum's getting started, and on the job. Not on the money simply-and, truth to tell, the money wasn't much-but on the very job itself. William thought of his father-in-law, and marveled how the biology of the sea could so fascinate some men that they valued it as much as marriage, and mixed the nature of one with the nature of the other. Was he himself, then, a deviation among lovers?-he was as ardent as anyone, but he wanted a simple life and a simple wife, and nothing more: all as plain and solid as a stone, and as free of philosophy. Then and there he felt himself an enemy of philosophy; hence of philosophers-hence of the one called Enoch and the one called Nick. He hated them because they theorized; Enoch, at least, theorized; the other perhaps only put it on. And if theory had not magnetized Allegra, she might never have succ.u.mbed to Enoch and Nick, that pair of exploiters, vagabonds, n.o.bodies. Or regard it vice-versa: if she had never encountered these two, she might at this moment still be unsurrendered to philosophy. And what he wanted was Allegra without the abomination of her notions; Allegra sans philosophy; Allegra quick with zeal, but over nothing more serious or terrible than a houseplant. He wished she cared for flowers; he had a pretty vision of a pliant little wife who could tend a rock-garden and keep her window-vases filled. Instead she let the n.o.bodies come and ruin her father's arbor. One of the trellises had given way weeks before, and fell into the fire with a wet hiss and the crackle of thorns. An auto-da-fe: they had burned next year's rose-crop on the stake of their ideology; property was a clot of blood to them; it was quite like burning up the future. And she told him it was a bad business, he ought to send the gardener away, because the man was always cross and called them reactionary names and got in their way. Here and in this at last William's tone would not be opposed: ”It was your father's idea to keep the ground intact. You can't dig tents into a lawn and expect gra.s.s to grow. Your Youth Leader's brought in the deluge, and the gardener's our finger in the dike; the gardener stays,” but the gardener quit. She pointed out how foolish it would be to hire another-the grounds were already too far gone: a tractor would be more practicable than a gardener. It no longer mattered to him. The fuel and the blankets and the freezer and the charred vines and the still-unmarried youth continuing to pelt him with frenetic letters (he was threatening to come and agitate for his job to begin) were footnotes to William's greater venture: he had extended a lease which he had no right to grant to begin with. But this time he was aware that she had promised him nothing in return, only what he knew already: that she was flesh. She piled her notebooks into a suitcase, meanwhile quoting something else Hugh had taught her-”Ich kann nicht anders,” she said; ”that's Martin Luther”-and left him to kick the polar bear's head in isolation. But he too could not have done otherwise; and he had yielded only the winter months, she had not asked for more than the winter months, and what contractor would care or dare to ferry across to an icy isle to plaster up a part.i.tion in the middle of the winter? He knew she was flesh; it was the worst a.s.surance she could have given him, Yet it was only until January. Meanwhile he would see about the feasibility of constructing a bridge.

And in February flesh turned to stone: stone beyond the purview of any geology. He went on the ferry to see. There would never be a bridge. There would never be a museum. There would never be a marriage. The girl came, and the doctor her father. The doctor looked around him and said: ”Awkward location for an aquarium.” The girl would not speak at all. She wrapped the knife very carefully in her handkerchief to take home with her; she had asked the coroner for it. ”Irregular,” the coroner said, but he gave it to her; only the day before he had drawn it from her lover's neck. William felt curiously obligated about the funeral. He went on the same airplane that carried the body, and was astonished at the emotionalism of the burial service. There were Armenians everywhere, they swarmed around the grave, dark fused eyebrows over angry drowning eyes. The parents took him to their restaurant and gave him dinner. The father said his son had tried to overreach himself. It was education that had killed him. It was the doctor who had killed him. He ought to have stayed with his own people, in his own people's business. It was the museum that had killed him, and the museum did not even exist. Her recurrent weeping made the mother's English indistinguishable.' ”You don't have a son,” William thought he heard her say; her accent was a deformity. He was glad to take the train for home; Allegra was there now. The boy's death had scattered the camp, and it was still twelve weeks before the Moscow March For A Better Future. It was a year since she had sat on the polar bear and declared herself to be mankind. It was a year since he had known for himself that she was flesh. She had arrived at Chapter Eight. She occupied herself with writing.

9.

”And then?” I said to William.

”And then nothing.”

He made a curious gesture. I had seen him do it several times as he spoke: he brought his fist upon his heart. It was curious, it was primitive; I half expected him to beat with it there. Instead the raised hand came down to the desk again, where it lay, apparently not penitential, but separated from whatever will drove it.