"I told her," Stefanie said, in the voice of Realpolitik.

I finished: "The main thing is it doesn't matter about me."

"It never did, girlie. I thought we settled that. I thought we talked all that out."

Stefanie noted coolly, "They probably ask her advice on every little thing down in Washington. You know. They probably do."

"That's right," my father said. "That's the way. -She's O.K., this little looker, she's got the world figured out."

"They get her advice on every little thing," Stefanie repeated. "That's how come she thinks she matters so much."

Tilbeck said happily, egging her on, "That's it. You've got it. You tell her."

"He doesn't think you matter either," Stefanie p.r.o.nounced, swinging the weight of her wet darkling hair. "And he should know, shouldn't he? I mean if he doesn't know-"

"He does know."

"Know what, for goodness' sake. Now I've lost it You two keep making me lose track-"

"Why I came," I said gravely.

"Oh that! I know that. Everybody knows that"

Tilbeck was pleased. "A public issue, hah?"

"Oh pooh, I'm not shy about it, believe me-anyhow I know why I came. And you," she bellowed down at me (mistress of games once more), "you came for the same reason! I would've known it even if the fat lady hadn't said so. Plain as day if you ask me."

"Plain?" said Tilbeck: with a honeyed look.

"s.e.x," Stefanie yelled against the acoustical cherubim. "s.e.x s.e.x s.e.x. That's the reason."

A stifled wheeze flew out of the region of the sofa. The Zeppelin halted horrendously in midair; then began to fall, slowly, slowly, its filmy banner twirling like a braid, hissing. Someone had stuck a pin in it.

"My G.o.d," soughed Purse.

"Now, now," said Mrs. Purse. "All that shouting down those stairs. Young lady, you don't care who hears what Now look, you've scared Dee right out of his nap."

The baby glared, it seemed, at nothing; then released a virtuoso aromatic helch.

"Good boy," said Mrs. Purse, and permitted the Mahatma to slither out of the grip of her thighs. "The secret of life, and he's. .h.i.t on it."

Wretched Purse sniffed. "They haven't been loading him with spirits again, have they?"

"What happened yesterday, dear, was he loaded himself," his wife demurred.

"s.e.x," sang the games mistress, drumming on the rail.

My father's great laughter mounted high and brilliant; he piled chord on chord out of huge and huger lung, and hawked up another thunder that pounced on all the ceiling host-on angels in narcotic bliss, on those bundles of bobby-pins that put themselves out for harps, and his head reared wonderfully back, like some sky-white horse, Job's horse, who saith among the trumpets, ha ha!

And what my mother knew once I knew then.

Stefanie softened; I saw her marveling at modifying, multiplying, mystifying circ.u.mstance; she marveled and she mulled: how queer it was that things never turn out as expected; and whether the secret of life is truly nothing more than a belch; or (because her mind was more original than most people guessed) the equivalent of a belch. "And you know what?"-She tackled the riddle. "Back at your bon voyage thing I thought you'd never even been kissed. Hey! It's getting to be shreds of daylight again. You two coming up or aren't you coming up, well?"

My father spoke. "That's a good reason. That's a fine reason. I told you that's what you came for, girlie," he said. "A taste of it."

"Come on, anybody traveling around up there with us, yes or no?" demanded the mistress of games.

"No," said my father, reaching out to pluck the baby from the hollow of the room; lo, the G.o.dlet, wrested from its niche, meandered, stony dust of pedestal powdered on its naked heels; it carried the acrid holy odor of the grove.

"I will. All right," I said, and went by the Purses, who were, I observed, still there. Goosepimples bristled in the central draft. Behind them Tilbeck had dumped Mohandas K. Gandhi on the piano keys and was feeding him black fudge-babies out of his pockets. Mouth pushed out and open for more, the sacred Mahatma knelt and stretched savagely after chocolate babies to chew, and all the while his sc.r.a.ped prayerful knees were inventing merciless discords, sc.r.a.pe on sc.r.a.pe, friction on friction.

But the Purses were still there. In spite of everything they were there. No lovers' moment had so far wiped them out. They were there.

15.

And then they were not.

But I will tell about that later. First I must tell how we wandered, we three: the lovers and I. We wandered, we three, through the upper tracts of that ruin, and for no plain reason and in no real direction. We went-that is my impression of it now-round and round and round; I have an underwater sense of it a flailing against veils and weight, a viscous floating memory, as of sailing somehow with limp limbs through some queer thick medium, a lake of honey, yellow, mellow, rich, heavy, yielding but reluctant repentant, slow; and in it we slowly revolve, we let ourselves be turned this way, that way, our heavy legs in their heavy motions seem both to swim and to be r.e.t.a.r.ded, as in dreams of perversely languid urgency, or with the dumb violations of some disbelieving slow-motion camera, unreeling strangeness and remorse.

That is how I remember it now; but often I think it is not this scene I am remembering, but something less certain, unlikely, intuitive, perhaps even occult, yet all the same real: that birth fluid in which I swung and turned, my mother just then throwing a dart at a tree and I just then crouching in my vast amniotic pool before the G.o.d of my habitation, whatever it might be: the braided totem of the umbilical cord perhaps: the thing or spirit, whatever it might be, that connects us to the certainty of life.

Nothing happened. We walked through room after room. I observed minute, repet.i.tions: William's son suddenly duplicating that habit of his adolescence-a book squeezed under an arm; William's son striding in the lead, Stefanie and I lolling behind side by side like a pair of sisters-so we had crossed a ballroom once, so we now took the top of that house. We took it and took it, and still there was more; odd walls, part.i.tions, cube beyond cube beyond cube, bureaus, dressers, wardrobes, chiffoniers, chests, escritoires, some with their sides hacked away (we actually came upon the saw balanced across two square chunks of fallen plaster)-the whole bulk and filth of it dead under a fresh moist skin of living mold, and all of it darkened to the dark of venous blood. Over the mirrors the webs looked as well-used as fishermen's nets. It was an uninteresting place. No one had ever really lived there-young servants, perhaps, homesick-and the museum offices had never finally come into being. Some houses are a memoir, but this was not. There was nothing private in it and nothing public. Nothing had ever happened there; even Stefanie felt it: "That Turk or Armenian or somebody," she began, "who committed suicide, wouldn't this've been a lots better place than the woods?" "The place doesn't matter," William's son said, but it seemed untrue. Places matter: or if not the place, then what has happened in it. Nothing had happened here but the breathing, in sleep, of youths: first the wistful squads of servants, then the planners of the Moscow March for a Better Future. But most had slept under the eaves, in tents, in the woods, in an idle niche, under a trellis. Not many were willing to mop or march. The mold marched. The mold mopped the brow of rot. The purple mold mopped and marched and was its own memoir. "How funny," Stefanie said, "all these ridiculous fancy old pieces and no beds. Didn't they use beds in those old days? Your ancestors I mean?" "It wasn't ancestors," I said, "for heaven's sake it wasn't that long ago. He burned the beds, that's all." "Who?" "Nick." "How funny. I mean how sad. I bet your grandfather's turning in his grave." "The sea turns all the time," I said. This excited her: "You mean he was buried at sea, your grandfather? I saw that once on television. They drape the coffin in an American flag and the captain's allowed to be sort of like a minister, then they slide it down this plank-" "It wasn't like that. It was done from the beach down there. It was just ashes scattered." "Ashes, that's weird though, isn't it? Isn't there a law against that? What with pollution and all? p.u.s.s.yhead, isn't there? You know, like sewage." She ran forward and shook his arm. He dropped the book like a tree dropping fruit; I glimpsed it in descent. It was called The Law of the Sea. We all three bent for it, but Stefanie was quickest. "Red in tooth and claw?" I murmured into William's son's curiously heated eyes. Stefanie admonished, "Look, don't tell he took it, O.K.? Especially William. You know Willie, Willie thinks everything's stealing. p.u.s.s.yhead took it because he saw it, it's from seventeen-hundred-and-something, that's why. Finders keepers. It's no-man's-land here anyhow, so who'd care anyhow? You don't see many like that. That book's valuable, you know that?" I said I did not. William's son said nothing.

We continued in the strange light. It was the quality of light that is filtered out of the sieve of a storm. Through a translucent blackness of panes came the sun new-born into evening, and where the windows were toothless and knocked down to just the spare warped gums of their frames, small narrow golden old-ladies' tongues full of the spittle of sparks slipped timidly in and out against the k.n.o.bs of desks and chests, cluttering the air with eccentric little glints. The storm sailed on. It sailed like a woman in long silky hems across a brush-hard lawn; at uneven intervals she stoops and we hear the burred movement of her gloves across the ears of the gra.s.s-all that is left of the thunder is this sly caress, and all that is left of the lightning are those erratic senile imbecile winks and licks.

The rain dripped thickly from the tops of things. It had a slow ripe sound, as though each globule waited to be generated from a dot into a soft fatness before it could swell off its shingle and fall with a plump pop downward.

We circulated, we wandered.

We went round and round and round.

The light was different now. It seemed sourceless. The sun had rolled away like a boulder, leaving a long ditch, the way a moving s...o...b..ll leaves its furrow in a wide flat field of snow; and br.i.m.m.i.n.g out of the sunball's trough oozed the light, a fluid light, like the mucous lining of an egg, diffused rather than diffracted, running over the banks of the sun's lane, smearing even the papery edges of the sky. And we three penetrated to the egg's center, a crucial pith, an innermost room, and there all at once all around us the yolk broke and spread. We were in a yellow sea. Our nostrils Med, the rooms filled, the rooms were separate cups of that glutinous liquor, and we pa.s.sed from room to room breathing thick gold light. A heaviness of hands and feet slowed us; we dragged on and on. "Is this where?" Stefanie said; "this is a good spot to put those bags, right?"-but her voice was like a chime through fog, pulled out of shape: "How about here? Behind that highboy thing? I mean for privacy what more could you want?" No one answered her. William's son did not speak. "Which room did your grandfather have? Where did your great-aunt sleep? Could this be your grandmother's place?" I did not know. I had forgotten that these were the rooms of the Huntingdons. It was only the servants I remembered. It was only the campers I remembered. On one of these surfaces the mother of my mother, hardening her paralytic lip, had bent hard on the pen of her hatred. On one of these surfaces the father of my mother had leaned over watery maps to dream the deep cells of fish born without eyesockets. In these lit square foyers my mother's whistling ancient violent aunt had knocked her shoulders between the walls, sweating and shouting at the summer snows, the January typhoons. I had forgotten about those lives without consequences. Where there are no consequences it is as if there had never been happenings. The rings of the handles of the madwoman's coffin rusted under a rusting anchor below a broken fountain. And those fish that had eaten at my grandfather's vitals (what else were they to eat at in that lonely seafarer?)-had they spurned the char of his bone? My grandmother's crippled foaming face had gazed on that beach: without consequence. My mother had proceeded to marry: without consequence. The servants had proceeded to mop: without consequence, for here was the indefatigable victorious mold. The museum had failed. The revolution had failed. The trellises were burned. The beds were burned. In the failing burning light we went round and round-how many rooms there seemed to be! how mazily interconnected they were, with their little foyers, and interior balconies, and piazzas suddenly suspended from a window, and surprises of corridors, and chinese-box doors, and agglutinations of writing-desks, and velvet borders of mold! Something private grew. It began in the mold, in the smell, it expanded in the thinning unfurling inexhaustible light: widening like a plate beaten flat and then flatter, always seeming less and always becoming more. Particle clung to particle and made a swimming brew of light. In it rocked the pit and seed of the private thing, privacy itself, folded in, lap within lap: a potent controlling engine for our strange pa.s.sage over those glowing thresholds. Why, why? Why did they turn and turn again, the lovers, in this desert of garbage, of vestige, shawled by light, like bedouins, sinking into heat as into a layered cushion, yielding their necks and waists and ankles into the languor of their queer slow purposeful circles? With my terrible patience I stalked them. Why, why? A tactile pressure came down upon us. A spasm of some intention propelled us. We were instruments of a scheme of permutation; a quest for consequence. Something would happen. "It will move," one says of a muscle; then a fist closes, an arm embraces.

A fist closed. An arm, a pair of arms, embraced. "For goodness' sake, you're always doing that. In front of her," Stefanie mumbled, then dissolved into concentration. They were kissing. Under our feet the piano drummed, but no tune emerged; wine ruled it, the divine small Bacchus rolled heels and hips over the teeth of its alligator smile wide as octaves. A door blared shut like a swear.

Something had happened. Dusk. They were kissing in the immobile dusk. The flashlight jutted between them in a closed fist. The Law of the Sea separated their torsos like a grid. Only their heads preyed one on the other, they nibbled then grabbed, they meant to swallow and eat one another; they were two blind fish at the dark core of the waters, at war, at war. The last web of sunset fell to pieces thread by thread. Yet I still saw their heads, black against the coming black, and their locked profiles, head invading head, b.u.t.ting, biting, bitter. They battled to eat one another, not for the bitter taste but for the sensation of the contest. I knew this. They kissed without complicity. Without complicity. I knew this. It was curious that I knew it. I was initiate. I knew it. I knew the taste of complicity. Nick had put it on my tongue like a pellet-complicity, amazing first-knowledge of the private thing, privacy itself. A commitment. I had acquiesced in the conspiracy against myself. I was what my mother had accused me of hoping to become: my father's accomplice. Her fears had destined me. I had joined up on his side at the flick of a tongue. It came into the inner room of my mouth, where I had thought only speech lived. No. Nature is more resourceful than that. The house of the word is where one learns how the word is superfluous. Taste; no word. Yet there was no memory of a physical flavor or even of the capacities of the inventiveness of a sense-organ. It is never sensuality that remains (I know now and glimpsed then), but the idea of sensuality; so that, finally, it is as though a word has been spoken after all-in code; and only a rea.s.sertion can decipher it Feeling cannot be stored. Neither can pain, so it is nothing to regret. The nerve gives only the now, and is improvident. Now The Law of the Sea fell like a gavel. This time no one stooped for it. A candle of dust exploded out of the impact and yawned back down. In the nub of the cloud the book lay on its spine with pinions extended: the exposed pages had the look of black blocks. Here in the black was this further black, like iron doors. It was only a law book. They had cast it from between their ribs. Nothing now kept body from body. Their bodies pressed-but experimentally, conscious of use, conscious of the absence of the book's intrusion like a confessional grid between them. They pressed and kissed without complicity. The privacy of complicity failed them. Under closed lids the bulge of their restless eyeb.a.l.l.s traveled from corner to corner, raising question after question. They were watchful. They watched one another in the secrecy of sensation. They felt penetrated by a witness. I was not their witness. They struggled to elude their witness; they drew back; the witness drew back; they drew in; the witness drew in; they breathed cautiously, so as not to be noticed; the witness noticed.

I stood, but was not their witness. I did not see them. I saw Nick. I saw myself. We lay crouching in one another's mind: private. In me private knowledge grew like a worm. No one observed.

Someone observed. In the conscious presence of each other they went on kissing with the dedication of spite, spiting the observer. They were the observer-they observed themselves. They were the watcher and the watched. They witnessed themselves. They spied on themselves kissing. They despoiled their complicity by listening in.

It was a curiously public scene.

In me meanwhile knowledge of the private thing: knowledge is the only real event in the world, and something had happened. In our slow voyagings through those ruined laden upper rooms, through the swimming light, something had happened. The lovers kissed; a law book had fallen; nothing would come of it Yet something had happened-not in them. In me the private thing turned: knowledge turned, love turned, what my mother knew I knew.

And navigated around the staring lovers. They had sprung open their eyes; they wondered at one another, watching, listening; would nothing come of it?-a thwarted anger inflamed their lips glistening with spittle; they would not yield, they would not forget, they witnessed their exchange segment by segment, tooth by tooth and claw by claw. Ah. Nothing would come of it. Nothing. I stepped over The Law of the Sea and went to my father.

On the way I pa.s.sed the Purses. They were there; they were there. And yet they were not. They were there and they were not-there. Their heads had rolled backward on the sofa. Their shoulders diverged and did not touch. A periodic and garrulous eruption rose in a reverberating column straight from Purse's nose. He snored. Mrs. Purse dozed fragilely-she had struck the wooden blanket to the floor. It lay in furrows like a brown sea slung between the sofa and the piano. By now I could comprehend the dark. It was night in the house and blue evening outside of it. The Purselets had escaped into the last of the blue. I heard them loudly bleating among the tents, m.u.f.fled, aimless, violent. What game did they play?-out of the center of their barbarian voices came the high pure cry of the little G.o.d. Perhaps they would kill him. A G.o.d must die his little death or he is no G.o.d. At the piano I could see the phantom whiteness of a rod going up and down-it was Nick's finger on a key, going up and down. He was still there, trapped by the problem of silence. The key loosed a mechanical sigh and nothing more. He played it and played it-with concentration: the single unheard note. He put each finger of each hand to it in succession, as though if not one surely the other would call out the note's voice, if only he were patient enough. Patiently he played the note. No voice came. The Mahatma's voice came. It came and came, clean small screams, uttered with the concentration of a whole soul, like prayer.

The Purses did not revive.

"Tourist," my father said. "Now you've seen the works. What did I tell you? Filth. The whole thing filth."

Up and down went the mute key.

"Why don't you get Mrs. Purse to fix it?" I said into the flowery air.

"Fix what?"

"That dead note."

"You believe in the Resurrection? I knew it. A Christian. Look, this note's the only thing in the vicinity that isn't filth. At least it holds its tongue. Only item in the house that does. -Who, them? What about 'em? I did it with Brahms' Lullaby, I put it in A minor. -That little looker coming back down?"

I saw with astonishment that he had all the while been waiting for her.

"She's busy," I said.

"That's right, occupied. Full up as we say."

A long flute-like shriek toiled out of the tents.

I said: "They're murdering that baby."

"What's one more or less, she can always cough up another, call it Fabian. After the Fabian Society."

Like a fool I fed him. "They're not Socialists, they practically said so-"

"All right, then she can call it Thomas Malthus. That'll do it, fine old capitalist. Utopian enough for a whole population. You know why they slid off to beddy-bye? Wasn't Brahms. Embarra.s.sment, I'd say. Lovers went up the stairs, that walloped Purse. Faded right out, just like that. Meanwhile she spreads the blanket nice and cozy on the floor, an invitation, what else? Declined it with party manners-had my hands full of babies, chocolate and otherwise. She's all right, Mrs. Purse, ready at the drop of the old man's eyelids."

"Then what put her to sleep?" I challenged.

"Shock," he answered, "when she sees me shake my head no. Poor woman pa.s.sed out cold. Meanwhile the baby's so upset at catching his ma flat out he unfolds his wings from inside his diaper and flies right out the window like a b.u.t.terfly. Doubtless they're sticking a pin through the middle of him this minute. Or a nail, crucifixion, why not?"

"Somebody ought to wake her-"

"No use. I drugged her myself. A little saltpeter for the nerves. For a woman of her years I always recommend celibacy. You might pa.s.s that along to Mrs. Vand. Though maybe she doesn't need it, considering the Amba.s.sador, hah? Hard in the brain, weak in the leg. The middle leg. An old saying y'know."

Still the Purses did not wake. They reclined like big straw dolls, ludicrous but stern. Their feet were tangled. Their hands were vacant. One would think they had fallen asleep from some extraordinary fatigue. A magic had hold of them. A robust presence restrained them: love was in the house. Love enervates the loveless. Love blots out self-love. Hence the Purses' dimming; blazing first-knowledge had stunned them into the beginning of dissolution. Already they seemed half-erased. They sprawled in the darkness, incapable of malevolent peering, vaguely glimmering, like a pair of whitish smears, yet there; still there; palpable, visible, real. Nothing had been consummated. The instant of love's consummation had not yet struck.

"A fraud is what you are," I told my father.

He did not turn. "Evangelizing. A Christian, didn't I just say so? I can always spot 'em. St. Paul on the road. Five minutes ago she doesn't know what I am, all in the dark y'see, and now she knows."

"I do know."

"And now she has to tell. They always know. And when they know they tell."

"A fraud," I said.

"That's right, repet.i.tion makes truth. Look, fraud's your mother's theme song, it's dogma by now. Always expect dogma. Straight from Mrs. Vatican, what else? Only say it the way you said it before."

"I didn't say it before. I didn't know it before."

"Did. The Gospel according to St. Allegra. I don't notice any new revelations. Yesterday you said blackmailer."

"No," I said, "I don't mean that."

He lifted an ingratiating shoulder. "Well why not? Girlie, I've sucked 'em. I get what I can-if it wouldn't be Nick it would be someone else. Remember that. It's the balance that counts, not who's in the scales. They do it for the balance, not for love, you follow?"

The word stopped me.

He saw that it did. "Love," he said, "you've got a point there. That's right, so say they do it for love. Especially the Amba.s.sador, he's the biggest lover of 'em all. Not that he loves people-just ideas about people. You think he can feel anything, that politician? Cold and hot out of the tap's about ah."

"Enoch isn't a politician."

"Isn't he though. You want me to believe he's that much different from the old days? Well, I believe in change. The world changes, girlie, that's a fact."

"You don't."

"Who says so?"

"You're just the same."

"That's nice. Same as what?"

I could not answer.

"Look," he said, "Mrs. Vacuum told you fraud, you go ahead and stick to it. Be like me, stick to a thing."

I said intently, "She believes everything you tell them. She thinks you mean what you say."

"Sure. I tell the truth about what's fake."

"You don't mean any of it."

"All right, so I tell lies about what's true, is that it? Girlie, take your pick. Either I'm a fraud or not a fraud."

"Not."

"Ha," he said, "not. I like that. First yes, now not. Not not, who's there?-not the same is what you mean, right? Changed like the rest of the sons of b.i.t.c.hes."