Part 55 (1/2)

”Show 'em the power of the U.S. The mighty fist. Show 'em we're right behind the regime. They won't dare anything if we're behind it. That's the theory.”

”p.u.s.s.yhead, come back,” Stefanie said.

I had to wait while he let himself be gathered over her impatient glitter. She licked the peak of his nose, upside down, and seized his fingers and made him dabble them in the mysterious crevice of her collarlessness.

”It'll be a shoo-in for Vand,” he finished, absorbed in Stefanie's small clever luring fist, indifferent to the mighty one behind the regime.

But all brightly the note of her voice struck: ”Who's your father? How come that woman kept saying father? I never knew you had a father.”

”She doesn't, stupid,” her lover answered.

13.

Up to a point love is plagiarism. If no one had ever remarked a pair of lovers-how they dazewalk through the streets of cities in the shelter of their wound secret arms, how they dawdle interminably in their chairs, how they pick and slap at one another, how they stare and laugh, how they talk incessant trifles, how they stand at stalls studying the five-cent candies-the ritual art of flirtation would be unknown. None of it is instinct; all of it is imitation. Who invented it? Ask who invented the wheeL What spread it? Rumor, the mother of convention.

There are twelve kings' heads; but thirteen live on the island this night-an island well-named by the hopeful Dutch, who called it Dorp, supposing an inhabited future. So, being thirteen, we make the place a town after all-”the Last Supper,” someone says (Tilbeck, probably), counting citizens; there is one seat short, of course. ”Now if we can just get a betrayal going here, that'll eliminate one-” ”The Holy Book should never be parodied,” says Purse. But the atmosphere has altered: a shudder of thunder, miles and miles away; the vast table somehow askew, plundered, dirtied, piled with cartons; Mrs. Purse punlessly manipulating a can-opener; no fire; the xanthochroid children ludicrously feeding on tinned fish, while all around live fish presumably breed and brood out their underwater lives; the sunset spoiled; Dee unwilling to relinquish his chair for a fraternal lap; the two newest guests in a single heap consequently; Harriet Beecher returned in the same dress she left in; Tilbeck reduced in status from patron to non-patron of Purses.

And in the lovers too there is something ritual. It is as ritual for William's son to show virile embarra.s.sment as it is for Stefanie to spoon new jam between his lips. It is as ritual for her to bleat at a tiny blade of lightning as it is for him to deliver scientific consolation. Ritually Stefanie sways on his knee. Ritually she first Unlaces and then thieves his shoe and begins to run with it into the trees. Ritually-a little wearily-he runs limping after her. They penetrate the wood. Perhaps they kiss there; perhaps not. At any rate we hear them sc.r.a.pe and scamper; leaves already dust the ground in there; the hum of thunder brings a gust; they come out with red and yellow leaves shaken onto their hair, quarreling and calling animal names.' ”You skunk.” ”You racc.o.o.n.” ”You moth-eaten.” ”You chewedup.” ”Dirty old bear. ”Five-toed sloth.” ”Blind as a bat.” ”Gnat.” ”Nit.” ”Double that and eat it.” ”Triple on you.” ”You began it.” ”You did.” ”I didn't.” ”You did.” ”All right then I'll get you for it-” And once more the ritual swiftness is on, and no one's will at work: the patient a.s.saulted trees take them in and shoot them out: they dart and shriek in the immortal chase. Obeying art, the girl pursues the boy into the grove. Obeying art, the boy flees. Rites are always witnessed: the Purses watch, I watch, Tilbeck appears not to watch-his neck is stretched up, the bottle's neck is upside down, the funnel of one activates the funnel of the other-but all the same secretly watches through the ruby window of wine. A tree hides the girl, a gap reveals her, she stalks, she vanishes, she reappears, she is seen running, a great thick old trunk blots her out, her arms hug a thinner trunk (but she has stopped behind it, so that what we merely mortal watchers note is a little tree wringing its wild human hands), she runs again, screeches, embraces a mightier tree; its root grows out of her parted leaning legs. After her the tired buffalo lumbers, scolding. She heeds not him but the wood, and lets herself be caught. Kicking up the long red stems of big leaves, her tongue visible in the corner of her open mouth, simpering like a saint, out she steps to be claimed. He claims her. And here a single inquisitive scimitar-edge of light slices through the ruined and flattened sky, and picks out the two of them (but only one of them spent) emerging side by side, each dangling the other's shoes, barely touching shoulder to breast, wrist to neck. ”A man died back there,” Stefanie calls as they come.

”We know that,” said Harriet Beecher: with the plainness of complacence.

”I think it's just too creepy-”

”And well you should.” Tilbeck persuaded the wine from his mouth like a cornetist quitting his instrument during the chorus of violins-a temporary separation for the cause of art. ”His ghost lives in that oak. The not-so-skinny one. The one you put yourself up against. You poked him in the bellyb.u.t.ton I think.”

Purse said quickly: ”No one knows who did it.”

”This little looker did it,” Tilbeck said. ”Poked him in the bellyb.u.t.ton.”

”Who killed him, Purse means,” Mrs. Purse amended.

”Who kill Co' Robin?” Dee asked loudly, and went back to sucking out the wooden eye of a king.

”n.o.body. It was a suicide,” Stefanie said. ”This Turk just went and killed himself.”

”Shut it, will you?” Her fiance had run himself out. He was breathing painfully, like an old engine. ”What do you want to tell that for?”

”It was an Armenian,” I settled it.

#x2014;They all turned to look at me: all but William's son. ”That's what I meant,” Stefanie said accusingly. ”An Armenian. They have those funny black eyebrows right across their face. Why would a Turk want to kill himself? I could understand an Armenian. I mean if I had eyebrows like that I'd kill myself.” And to William's son, clandestinely: ”You're right about her. She knows plenty.”

Throw heard and swelled. ”We all know plenty.”

”Aha!”-His mother pounced. ”In times of plenty what Purse doesn't? But nowadays! Nowadays-”

”Not a nickel's worth. Didn't bring back a newspaper,” Purse submitted. ”Not even that.”

”-we could do with a tiny bit of good will here and there. It isn't as though we weren't on the verge of foreign parts. It isn't as though you weren't a traveler yourself and didn't know about expenses. The poor child, you said a little dress, no hand-me-downs for her, only girl in a mob of brothers ... We counted on you, Mr. T.-”

”Count on the Lord,” Purse said severely. ”Never count on man. The unstable element is the human one. Never count on a human caretaker.”-His wife, it seemed, had sufficiently filled his ear. ”The Divine Caretaker keeps us always in mind,” he finished; the notion made him brave but dismal.

But Tilbeck it made bright. ”Right you are. As caretaker of that little commission I believe I'm a failure. Ah forgive it-a failure. Forgot to get you a dress, Harriet. Chalk it up to distraction of maritime composition. It drove out all garment thoughts but those of”-how deep, how insincere, his sigh!-”the Wet Green Garment of the Earth. We wrote to the world, this child and I.”

”Mr. T. wrote,” said Harriet Beecher. ”Then we threw the bottle overboard. Nothing I thought of was any good.”

”Seafaring notes about pirates,” he chided her, ”are redundant. Who's to find it but a pirate anyhow? And what good would that do? Poor fellow, be like looking in a mirror for him. It wouldn't enlighten. A very sad tautology.” He spoke to Purse: ”I avoid newspapers. Except to light fires with. There's a surf and sc.u.m of 'em in the house if you want.”

Purse considered. ”Look here, you put yourself out as a traveler,” he said finally.

”I've been around. Right”

”A man of means.”

”Means, you bet”

”And an owner. An owner? You own this land?”

This inquisition caused Tilbeck to elevate the wine once more. ”Everyone owns the Dry Green Garment of the Earth,” he purred after a moment.

”If everyone owns something no one owns it. That's why Purse is against nationalization of industry,” Mrs. Purse noted, with no special relevance. And then, with particular relevance, ”What a long swallow that was!”

”We should nationalize you, Mrs. Purse,” Tilbeck said gallantly.

She took this haughtily and without pleasure. She meant to punish him for his impostures and his failed promises. Undoubtedly she saw in him now simply a man tainted by sentimentalism. He liked children, and what was that to her who made them? A caretaker on a little salary, what was that? Where was Harriet Beecher's new dress? And where the twenty bits of her own splendid new drill? And where poor yearning Bronson Alcott's dream of an accordion? And where Purse's alligator traveling case and the fourteen volumes of lateral femur development to be wittily inscribed Purse-stare et Price-stare? Ah, all prizes flew. Imagination. They had all seen the money. A petty larcener. A grand one, perhaps. She supposed the money was given him to keep the place in repair. For plaster. For s.h.i.+ngles. For disinfectant Silverfish swarming everywhere. The kitchen a wreck. Burning the furniture bit by bit. Nothing was re-plastered, nothing re-s.h.i.+ngled, nothing disinfected. He spent it any way he pleased. A betrayal. Bought friends.h.i.+p. Bought girls and women. Bought her. She saw a lecher on a little salary; a habitual liar, she told Purse; told Purse, then crept away while he sleep-wheezed, to put her spine on the cold night-sand-she, the mother of so many cradle Friends: only to be abandoned for a tedious Attachment. Mrs. Purse's meditations sprang out; her long gums curiously but potently revealed them. Full of the energies of an anti-sentimentalist, her reb.u.t.tal fell on me: ”I'm not an industry,” she retorted, all at once brilliantly literal.

Tilbeck hardly compromised. ”Ah yes you are,” and patted smooth Harriet Beecher's cotton-white, thread-thin bangs, which a wicked wind was disarranging. A terrible gesture just then: to lean a hand out like that. ”You're a whole factory in fact,” he obliged her.

”Don't bother that child,” Mrs. Purse began, and worked her way toward inspiration; instantly she found it. ”You seem to think a Purse is always good for a touch!” she yielded it up, but with a sadness-almost with a carelessness. Disenchantment was her worm. She was wearied.

Purse brushed away his wife's crescendo. ”Ethel. Will you let me. Now look here. Either you do or do not own this place. Either you are or are not an owner here.”

”Sure I'm an owner,” my father said.

”He is not.” Thus Stefanie-suspending a toothpick an inch from her readied teeth: she was absorbed in spearing tunafish out of a can. ”What a roach to say he is,” she muttered; then sniffed hard, as if the stuff might not be fit to eat Though daughter of a mother who had never had the profit of Miss Lamb's or Miss Jewett's, she did not often dine on democratic fare. Or so the p.r.i.c.kle in her nose suggested.

But Tilbeck had his answer. ”I own myself,” he said mildly.

”Then you should control yourself,” Mrs. Purse advised.

”Right, leave it to you, perfect rule for a factory”-he roared this straight into Purse's untriumphant jealous scorn. ”For a factory absentee owners.h.i.+p's no good. If you don't keep your eye right on it it gets away from you. You've noticed that, hah? You've got to be on the spot every minute or you lose what you've made, right?”

”Exactly,” said brave Purse. ”Never trust a caretaker. I've already shown that. The Divine-”