Part 35 (2/2)

”In May,” he said, ”she went to Moscow. A boatload of them went, not nearly so great a crew as they had hoped for, however. The s.h.i.+p-fare stopped them.”

”And the time in between?”

”Insignificant. Quarrels and so forth. She scarcely left the house, I might say. -None of it concerns you in the least.”

”No. And Moscow?”

”Oh, a vast mess and fuss, everything in the newspapers of course. -I don't doubt your mother's still got the clippings. I used to mail bits of the Times to her, all hideous. I did it because she asked me to. The whole affair impossible. Insane and subhuman. It can't be adequately told. A streetfight once-the Scandinavian contingent against the South Americans: everybody drunk on all sides. That was Moscow. -And parades. Right out of the trains and into the parades.”

”I didn't know my mother knew him in Moscow. Enoch, I mean. -When the fact is she knew him longer ago than that. She knew him far, far back.” I absorbed this. ”She traveled with him?”

”With him and the other fellow. Greek s.h.i.+p, the Croesus. The other fellow was seasick all the way. The Negro was with him as usual. Also a decent little chap, couple of years behind me at school, good family, name of Sparrs. I don't know how he got himself mixed up with them. There was a pack of very foolish girls, as I recall. How many fares she paid I never found out, though I wrote the checks myself. -The upshot of it,” he grimly provided, grinding my questions out of the atmosphere, ”was that she never came back. Not as my wife. Right after the Moscow thing she went off with him. She went off with him.”

”With Enoch,” I concluded, thinking he meant to another Rally somewhere.

William coldly looked the other way. ”No.”

”With Tilbeck?-Ah,” I said.

”At last,” he blew out, scorning the slowness of my comprehension. But I was slow because he was strange. ”The pair of them together. Not that I guessed it at first. There were so many parades in so many cities. At every point I had letters explaining the necessity and importance of each. One was for establis.h.i.+ng one thing, another for abolis.h.i.+ng another thing. Sometimes they abolished in one parade what they had just established in the previous parade.” I wondered whether this was a sort of angry joke, but his voice pealed disgust, and was not indulgent, so I followed the stern entrapping fold of his s.p.a.cious brow in puzzlement: it could not be said that he suffered. There was in his manner the modest s.h.i.+ver of self-gratulation that always accompanies ritual disapproval. ”It was the words she loved,” he continued. ”Reform. Advancement. Equal Distribution. Their mythos.”

”But all the while she was with Tilbeck.”

”Don't suppose he was to be distinguished from the words. He had other words. He was a cult in himself.”

”The cult of art,” I said, ”the cult of experience.”

”Neither,” William corrected. ”The cult of the cheat. They went to Petrograd. They went to Stockholm. I wrote. She wrote. She wasn't ready to come home, oh not in the least. I wrote. She wrote. Then she gave the reason: Europe was better for finis.h.i.+ng the novel, she had to stay until it was done. That meant Nick, so I did the only feasible thing.”

I was hopeful he would say what the only feasible thing was.

”I ceased' to write,” he announced.

”Did she?” But he had disappointed me.

”Letters in flocks. Bundles of them. Long long letters. Oh, they gave themselves airs. Travel letters. She must have a.s.sumed they had the sort of literary value which even I might recognize. Genre writing, you see. I imagine I was supposed to save them. She sometimes slipped into a when-these-are-published vein. But I tore them up. They were unanswerable. Unanswerable.” He wandered off into meditation, speculation, recrimination. I waited. When he came back to me his speech was altered by a mysterious rheum: ”Italy,” he said queerly. ”They went a trois-took the colored boy with them. They went on down to Rome and left him behind in Milan. They went to Switzerland and Norway and Germany, in that order. Well, in Germany it was the New Order, and a row they cooked up, and it turned out they just skipped out of there in time.”

”The Nick of time,” I said, pleasing myself.

William appeared offended. ”In Munich he got hold of a Fascist s.h.i.+rt and put it on, all smeared over with calves' blood. They had gone to a slaughterer's for it, with a bucket.”

”You read this in the papers?”

”Oh, better than that. I received the consul's complaint in the mail. She was listed as a provocateur by the n.a.z.is and I was requested to get her out for her own safety.”

”A protest against the regime it was,” I surmised.

”On his part? It was the most scandalous act he could conceive of in that place, so he did it”

I examined this. ”And all the time she kept writing you, and you never replied.”

”I don't say I wasn't sending her checks as she requested them,” he informed me. His eye sharpened abruptly. ”I wouldn't permit any other arrangement. I admit to that When she was out of money she had to ask for more. I considered myself financially responsible for her.”

”As trustee,” I gave out.

”As husband.”

”She hates not having her letters answered,” I said, marveling how with these two liturgically parallel phrases, trustee and husband, these opposites of lawchamber and bedchamber, we mirrored our talk's beginning-though, as in a gla.s.s, our mouths stood pertinently reversed: where earlier, claimed as the husband of my mother, William had enjoined me to seek my stepfather for that place, now with the stroke of my stepfather's name I brought it to him that his old rights, even his negligences and omissions, had been usurped. ”Enoch never answers her letters, and she hates it. He doesn't answer anything except emergencies. He never even answers her cables.”

”Ah, but your mother is prolific with those,” William said.

I agreed it was her habit to send a great many cables.

”I meant emergencies,” William said. ”She has always been prolific with emergencies.”

”She likes excitement.”

”She likes crisis. She likes it well enough to fabricate it She learned how long ago.”

”She doesn't fabricate,” I objected, more defensive than convinced.

”She doesn't need to any more. I'm afraid the crises are all thoroughly genuine now. Your poor mother,” he said; it was a figure that succeeded with him. ”She used to run after mirages of agitation. You see they made these things up. They made them up.”

”The crises? The emergencies?”

”In those days,” he a.s.sured me spitefully, ”there was no evil in the world that they didn't make up.”

”They didn't invent the Communists,” I said.

”But they invented the ma.s.ses. In fact they went all over the Continent looking for this particular invention of theirs, in order to stir it up. After Germany,” he persisted in a thickness of pursuit, ”they went to London. Vand was organizing there. A terrific riot afterward, I never got it straight why. Something about Poland. Little Sparrs got the worst of that one. Finally in the middle of the summer the two of them went down to Brighton and took a cottage. By then they had been traveling more than a year. A year, more than a year, a year and a quarter-”

I interposed in surprise, ”You let it go on so long?”

William pinned me with a derision so acutely spurning that I felt beggared and demeaned and had to persuade myself not to fear those fine milky triangles that, by their innocent contrast on either side, burnished the abscess-like roundness of his eyeb.a.l.l.s. His intention was to humiliate. ”My-dear-child,” he lilted at me with a kind of contemplative danger, ”exactly what would you have had me do? What, what, and then what? They had me”-he turned away and I wonderingly saw how the danger crumpled like a paper thorn-”they had me wearing horns.”

”Then you ought to have horned in on them,” I said at once and without pity. ”You let them get away with it. You could have gone over there and stopped it.”

”You like to speculate,” he said harshly. ”It couldn't be done. The difficulty of-the implausibility-I was at the time in no-” he twitched and switched away-”position to leave my affairs unguarded. The incident, its occurrence on the property, had brought on-”

”You mean that boy's suicide,” I said.

”-certain investigations, there were a number of contrivances, I was forced-”

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