Trust: A Novel Part 50

Purse frowned terribly. He was jealous of his wife.

"Here's your dinner," said she, holding out a plate to me. "Do you like to hear singing? Mr. Tilbeck has a charming repertory. He sings epigrams. He makes up the tunes."

"He sings Robert Frost," Throw said.

"Sing Robert Frost," Mrs. Purse wheedled.

He sang: "HOW are we to WRITE the Russian NOV-el in America a-a-a-as long as LIFE GOES on so UNterrib-LEE?"

"Oh, that's funny. That's really lovely and hilarious," said Mrs. Purse.

"I would like-" he had a mouthful of wing-"to set Plato's Dialogues to music. It's one of my ambitions. Only-" here he swallowed-"it would make a very boring opera."

"I don't see why."

"Too much recitativo."

"Sing Robert Frost again," Harriet Beecher said.

"Harriet Beecher, don't you nag. You let Mr. Tilbeck eat his meal."

"I don't see that life goes on so unterribly in America," Purse demurred. "The problem of social justice remains, in spite of supermarkets. No one can say it's altogether solved, even in America. Pockets of unemployment all over the country, to take only one aspect. Or take the situation of the migrant workers."

"Ghastly situation," said Mrs. Purse. "Babies in the fields right alongside the pickers. They suckle them in the furrows. That is nothing like roast chicken in the open air."

"Or take the moral situation."

"Ghastly moral situation," said Mrs. Purse, discharging a cuc.u.mber from a basket. "Have one of these, Mr. Tilbeck-you already have our grat.i.tude. I hope it's not too soon to tell you what a lovely and hilarious week this has been."

"The conventions are loosening. The seams of society are opening. G.o.d means very little to the young. We're breeding atheists. The idea of love has lost its sanct.i.ty."

Mrs. Purse said coquettishly, "My husband thinks you might be an atheist, Mr. Tilbeck."

"If a lady can make a motor out of chaos, surely G.o.d could make the universe," Tilbeck said, "out of similar material."

"There, you see? Of course you're not an atheist."

"She got it to work," Throw said, "I told you she would."

"The universe? I shouldn't wonder. Though I did notice the Milky Way out of kilter last night. A little oil maybe? Observe the twilight, Mrs. Purse. A shade too dark for this hour. I hope you'll do something about it."

"End of summer," Mrs. Purse murmured. "Charming. We'll miss your teasing, Mr. T."

"More and more," said Purse, gnawing at the k.n.o.b at the end of his joint, "the old values fall. Honor becomes the appearance of honor. Authority becomes the appearance of authority."

"For one thing," Mrs. Purse said, "your shear-pin was broken off clean. The universe is more reliable than that."

"Reliability becomes the appearance of reliability."

"Ghastly," Mrs. Purse said. "Rinse your chin, Walt Whitman. Who wants more?"

The second bird was brought to the table. They all wanted more. Further disputation over distribution of two drumsticks. Mohandas K. Gandhi got one. Purse-reserving decision in an access of fairness-got the other.

It was nearly night.

Mrs. Purse addressed me: "Your father is a charming companion. Delightful."

Purse said, "Generous. Very generous."

Mrs. Purse said, "I look forward to a charming correspondence."

Tilbeck said, "There I'll fail you. I don't write much. As a rule."

Moths were solemnly revolving.

"Here," Mrs. Purse explained, "we follow the universe slavishly. We go to bed with the stars."

"There's nothing else to do," Tilbeck said.

"The habit of electric light makes one forget the ordinances of the Lord," Purse said. "It's very black without a moon."

"Fine moon tonight," Tilbeck said, watching the children ' dance under it.

"The moon makes them go wild. They look so primitive."

"It's only Dodge Ball."

"But they use a stone. Poor Dee. He always gets trampled."

"I should like to've known you in the Stone Age, Mrs. Purse. You would have advanced us to Iron in a month."

"Charming. What a pity you don't correspond. My husband writes voluminously."

Purse dug. Then he put down his spade and began fo bury the debris of dinner. Into the hole went the bones of two chickens.

"A paleontologist like yourself might dig all that up in the Fourth s.p.a.ce Age," Tilbeck said, "and then what?"

"Maybe by then this island will have disappeared," Mrs. Purse reflected.

"Where could it go?"

"Oh, Mr. T., don't throw your bottle in."

"Empty-"

"Yes, but the children would so like to put a note in it. And give it to the tide. Harriet Beecher asked me specially to ask you."

The bottle was spared burial. Purse covered over the hole. "I think it's time now."

"Yes, it's time," said his wife. "Though the moon is like the sun."

Stones were dropping one by one into the brook.

"We're coming," Bronson Alcott called.

"You'll play again tomorrow. Manny, is your chin clean? It's time. Where's Dee?"

No one knew. -A search. They found him asleep under the table.

"His mouth's all funny."

"It's purple."

"It's the color of the house-mold."

"Make him walk."

"He won't. He won't wake up."

"Why does he smell like that?"

"He smells nice. He smells like Mr. T."

"Ah."

"He was in wading."

"He helped himself, didn't he?"

"Wasn't the cork in tight?"

"I think," said Tilbeck, "you've misnamed the boy." Purse said: "We meant him to emulate a saint. Self-restraint and discipline, discipline. We had in mind that sort of saint."

"But he wants to be a G.o.d," Tilbeck said.

They carried Bacchus off to his tent.

"Good night, Mr. T."

"Good night, Miss Tilbeck."

"Good night," I answered, startled.

"Good night."

No one had intimated it would be an idyll. Not Enoch, not William-not even my mother, who knew.

9.

Curious: in color there is a difference between what is pale and what is light. We dark heads are notorious for our attraction to you blonds, whom the sun has honored with imitative pigment. In my mother's family we were all black-haired; occasionally-like my grandfather-carpet-brown. It was the Scottish element-or so my mother a.n.a.lyzed our Italian looks: she blamed it on Caesar's legions. "Mediterranean types on Sauchiehall Street," she liked to say of Glasgow-"short dark little wops of women," and on account of the Roman invasion she had always gone to the pale. William, milkishly pale, turning pinker and pinker, the underside of a white cat's tongue lapping milk. Enoch, white skin, hands very white and square, like geometrical abstractions, eyes pale as theories. He was one of those blond Jews of whom it can never be said that they remind us of the prophets. The golden-bearded Jesus of the North, that mild blond womanish lamb of the calendars, is a sham. So outwardly was Enoch. Two thousand years' absence from the Near East had left the curve of his mind intact, but had colored him differently. He should have looked like an Arab. Instead he was the perfect Pole, the perfect Ukrainian, the perfect Shtchepan or Ivan of the Russian provinces in the Pale-urbanized and scholarized out of farmer strength and sinew and farmer hulk and bulk. Call it, with the biologists, protective coloration. When the creature enters the environment, the environment enters the creature. But it never protected. The true Shtchepans and Ivans knew which faces to smite, in spite of the faces' having become like their own. Enoch's paleness was not William's, though only history, not the spectrograph, can tell us the reason for it.

And here at last was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck-a very blond man, son of a Swede (if he was to be trusted)-looking into the fire, which sparked like a live wire on snow (re-igniting itself on remnants of grease), muttering good night to nine pale Purses. The sun, when it chooses to honor its northern people with paleness, makes them pay for it with fear of the sun; they shun what they reflect. Perhaps the sun is jealous of its rivals, even when it has appointed them itself. But it might be otherwise. The paleness might signify fatigue rather than favoritism. What of Prometheus after he stole the fire? Presumably he was tired. It was his one great act. Nothing could equal it, not even his n.o.ble pa.s.sivity afterward with the vulture. So with the pa.s.sive blonds of the North. Having seized the color of the sun to live in their hair-through what exhausting scenes of mythological prowess or brawn or cunning who can say?-they have exerted themselves as far as they can. They have taken the sun for beauty, and it is the end of their obeisance to beauty; there can be no obeisance without impulse. They have done themselves in. Their pale heads and arms faintly tissued with pale hairs droop across the northern cap of the world. Race-justice does not allow us to criticize the Danes and the English and the Germans for their spiritual languor. It is no small task to have leaped into the copper pot of the sun and come out dyed with the eternal gleam. If, having done this much, they have no energy left for the other masques of brilliance, who can blame them?

None of this describes Tilbeck. He was not pale; he was light. How explain the difference? The dark heads of the South have taken their sober colors from the black shadows under a congregation of trees; yet they skip with vigor, and compose themselves into beauty aimlessly and easily. Perhaps, having opted for the wood, they have learned the wood's powers of secret quick growth and hasty composition, and the lush lesson of the sap. Perhaps, having opted for the wood, through which the sun is strained and enters poorly, they have had to learn to generate their own profuseness. No one knows the answer, though Tilbeck wore the answer in his skin. Animation-a collection of vitalities, all harbored cautiously, none wasted (as pale Purse, running, wasted his)-gathered in him as in a headquarters. He had the authority of a nodule or centrality of light-not alone the centrality that issues, but the centrality that receives. The firelight charged at the fair fine flat tongue of hair that lay across his foreskull as though seeking a brother. He took what he took as though he were capable of taking more and even more. I thought of the tree in the swamp and its appet.i.te for light, and just then he gave a savage spit into the fire and told me he was part Greek. It justified the Nicholas.

"Like Polygon then," I said, bewildered into satire. "Greek like Polygon who owns the boatyard who brought the-"

"Sure. Polygon's my cousin. I always send him business."

"You're not Greek."-And put scorn for liars in it.

"What's the matter, you don't like being Greek? What I am you are. And I dreamed up the Parthenon."

"Slaves built it."

"I wasn't a slave."

"In Greece? How do you know?"

"Because I know. A man knows when he's free. That moon means business. The size of it. Means autumn."

"But it's hot." I had decided to be peevish.

"Hot," he echoed, "as h.e.l.l This place is good for another month, I figure. At most"

"Then where will you go?"

"Somewhere else."

"Don't you ever plan?"

"They're the slaves. The planners. You've never known anyone but slaves, hah, girlie?"

"I suppose." Then I gave in. "I suppose you mean people like William. Did you ever meet William?"

"Never had the misery. The Amba.s.sador I knew welL Prize slave of them all."

"In Egypt"

"Hm?"