Part 47 (1/2)
”But you were rescued all the same.”
”Well, my father says expect the unexpected, that's how come,” he affirmed. ”We had to give up after a while because Dee was starting to holler, so we went into this Automat place and sat down, the whole nine of us, and my father was thinking maybe we ought to spend the money on the extra rooms, we had to stay somewhere, and all the time we were talking it over, there was this man. We didn't even notice him. In New York City you never notice anybody, and this man kept on sitting drinking coffee at a table and sort of eavesdropping. It was terrifically discouraging. In spite of everything my mother made a joke, she said we reminded her of the Children of Israel, we were so dis-Pursed, with no pillow for our wanderers' heads and no place to sleep. Then all of a sudden this same man that was drinking coffee comes up to her and says why not sleep with me, madam, if you people would like to I could set up these tents for you on this property I have. He said it was on this island that's called Town Island and there's no town on it, but if we came, right away there'd be a whole population. Then he told us about hiring Polygon's launch to come over with, because he had only this one little motorboat that wouldn't hold us all. He said if we didn't mind roughing it we could stay the whole week and he'd be glad to have the company.”
”And you accepted?” I marveled. ”Just like that, out of the blue?”
”Sure, we took the train right out to the boatyard.”
”They weren't afraid? Your father and mother?”
”Of what?”
”Of a stranger. It might have been an ambush. He could have robbed them. He might have been a murderer. His whole idea could have been to fleece them.”
”Not Mr. Tilbeck!”
”But they didn't know.”
”My father says never turn down an angel of mercy. My father says trust in your fellow-man and you trust in the Lord.”
I murmured, ”That sounds very nice.”
”But it's true! It hasn't cost us a penny since we got here, that proves it. It's much cheaper than any hotel. -See that sort of bend in the sh.o.r.e line up ahead? No, across.” He pointed and listlessly I followed his finger toward the green. ”That means we're practically there. It isn't taking very long, is it? Even without the motor.”
But I was preoccupied with a meditation: Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck as angel of mercy. ”It hasn't cost a penny?” I repeated.
”Not even for the groceries. Mr. Tilbeck bought everything. That was when the motor was still working. We cook things over a campfire, like cave people.”
”He hasn't said anything about money?”
”You mean asked for it?”
”Like rent,” I said. ”For putting you up, for instance. Or for anything. Money in general, I mean.”
He shot out a quick scornful whistle. ”Mr. Tilbeck's rich. He's got tons of money. He's got this whole island.”
”But he burns beds, washes in a brook, cooks in the open-”
”Well, he doesn't think it's worthwhile to rehabilitate the place. He told my father that. You see he doesn't really live there. He doesn't live there permanently. He's a traveler. He lives wherever he pleases. He has islands with old houses all over. He has an island right off Greece, right in the middle of the Mediterranean Ocean.”
”Crete?”
”He didn't say its name. You know some islands don't have names. But he owns them all over. He's terrifically rich.
Somebody that rich wouldn't ask for rent, especially not from us. With nine of us it wouldn't be fair.”
”It wouldn't be justice,” I said. ”Does your father believe that story?”
”My father says never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
”That's new,” I said. ”That's one I never heard before. What about your mother?”
”She said it was bad manners to worry about anybody else's situation. She said we should just keep Purse-spective on our own.”
”That makes sense too,” I capitulated.
He spelled out c-e-n-t-s, and explained that his mother, being a Purse, insisted she was always full of this. ”But my father told my mother confidentially one night that Mr. Tilbeck might be a counterfeiter,” he informed me. ”He has all this money. I saw it myself.”
”Well, the question is did you see the minting machine?-To be fair, I mean.”
But he had antic.i.p.ated me. ”Harriet Beecher and Manny and I looked all through the cellar and couldn't find it. He might keep it on one of his other islands though. He might keep it on Crete. You know what my mother said?”
I was afraid to hear; I dreaded Purse-iflage.
”She said confidentially to my father that Mr. Tilbeck is a habitual liar.”
”And they don't mind that?”
”My father says it isn't necessary to believe the word of anyone but the Lord. Mr. Tilbeck told Harriet Beecher he might buy her some new dresses before we go to Idlewild Airport. He might get Al an accordion. Al's dying for an accordion. He might get my father a brand-new traveling case.”
”Maybe all that's a lie.”
”We all saw the money,” he a.s.sured me, and I had a mournful yet comical intimation of how they, in Purse-suit of the schnorrer's famous golden fleece, intended to fleece the fleecer. ”Schnorrer,” I must in spite of awkwardness here interrupt, was a sly gift from my stepfather, flung down in my presence for his own mischief and his wife's mystification, and chipped from a language which he had once elucidated to my mother (who hated it) as being both remarkable and homely; but equally she hated knowing that he knew it, on account of which he had sometimes slipped me a word or two of it-”di goldene medina,” he taught me to call America, whether with or without irony I was then too young to estimate-and vulgarly she warned him that he might yet forget himself and use his mamaloshen in direct address before the Senators: at which he nodded with the gladness of spitefully-overlooked incongruity-”Aha! Parasites and spongers! Do-nothings! Swillers at the troughs of drunken lobbyists! Take Hundt, that schnorrer-if he leaned any farther to the right they'd have to fish him out of the Atlantic Ocean! Take MacElroy, another schnorrer cla.s.sique, with an absentee record as long as the history of the, the-gypsies!-Thought I'd say Jews, did you?” he cried and crowed, and the inimitable word tumbled into my possession to await its moment of attestation-which struck, surprisingly, in this boat that crossed a bay to take me to my father. I saw then, and with perfect conviction, the simultaneity and constriction of scope of the world's schnorrers-a Senator or two nibbling at this company and that, Tilbeck nudging, grasping, gleaming, menacing, the homiletic Purses out after the smell of convenience, cash, lodging, loneliness. Did my mother's money support them all? Did the blatant swelling of her investments, like the breathing of some gigantic horn-armored but entirely mythic creature-the gryphon, perhaps-nourish on the crest of their inhalations the whole dependent universe of schnorrers, the high and the low, the whole gratuitous grating ungrateful gratuitant but above all ingratiating company?-since, at least at first meeting, schnorrers are without doubt the most charming persons in any society, and attract deliriously before they prey. Did she, unawares, sway the companies that several of the most charming of all the Senators milked in return for certain insignificant exceptions, scarcely noticeable, in certain negligible bills? Or, to take another aspect of the same radiant herd, how many courtesies and generosities and canny gifts and little girls' dresses and rings for ladies and little boys' thingamajigs had she year after year unwittingly bought to please those charmers who chanced to please Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck? Plain that Connelly's account-books were the organisms on which now even this mob of nine lean Purses fed, and meanwhile-meanwhile? O shock of happenstance-curls of water poured off the oar-blades, and the boat without loss of tremor seemed not to move on the tremulous platter that moved beneath us.
”Why did you stop rowing?”
The boy had his fists secure in his lap; the wet paddles shone high in the air, dripping grandly. And there we were in the middle of the bay-not, so far as I could-see, a matter yet of land ho.
”We're nowhere near a beach,” I objected.
”How do you know there's a beach?” he caught me up. ”I didn't tell you there was.”
”I a.s.sume there is,” I said. ”I was thinking of the footprint in the sand. Robinson Crusoe. Don't all islands have beaches?”-but if I had a.s.sumed a beach it was because of that other s.h.i.+pwreck in my brain, where early early and from the start I had figmented a sandbar the color of gold, and a yellow shoal glowering with mist, and rocking there a figure tugged and secreted like a sculpture by tide, or like the raised effigy on a coin of some overrun civilization, the lineaments of its caesar's profile swathed in undersea moss, the eye a rubbed freckle, the n.o.ble nose worn to a snub, conquest sea-dyed pale dead tan. My father's body lay in my brain, and in the same sea-vessel yet elsewhere on still another beach the body of my governess spread itself flat on a fiat rock, sporting motionless; and here is the lizard of my father's tread, crouching; and Palestine burning; while beyond, in the water, as they join, a book opens wings without lungs and drowns.
We sported motionless; the boy, the boat. ”Bring down the oars. Let's go on,” I commanded.
But he had stopped to look me over.
”What does he want you for?”
A question that knows its own answer is a lie. ”Who?” I lied.
”Mr. Tilbeck. You didn't just go and invite yourself? He asked you, didn't he?”
”Well, not exactly,” I said. ”I asked myself. It's a story. You see I have this very rich mother. Not as rich as Mr. Tilbeck maybe, but still very rich. Extraordinarily rich. If you put all the people who live on her in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p the earth would be left a bare skull. And one of the things about my mother is this: she wants me to be free. -You care to hear this story?”
”Is it true?”
”Quakers don't lie.”
”You're not a Quaker,” he said.