Trust Read Free

she remarked once, "all that is terribly remote. After all, I was
with
him for less than two years over twenty years ago! You can't reasonably expect anything but the vaguest impression by now. It's hardly left a trace," she said, and looked out at me from her wedge of curls with an uncharacteristic bewilderment—"except for you." This was not the case with her first husband, who had preceded my father—not only was her impression of him still lambent, but she did not appear to have any desire to extinguish it. Of the three lawyers she retained, this man, my mother's first husband, was the one she most often consulted; now and then he would dine with us, and my mother would call him "dear William," and ask after his wife. He was married to a woman so different from herself—so clearly diligent and domestic, so innocently self-aware and eager to be courted—that it was obvious, even to my mother, what had been the trouble. William was too august and substantial a personage to be diagnosed as happy or unhappy; it was plain, however, that my mother thoroughly respected him, since in his presence she chose dull and meagre endings for stories which, in other company, she used to conclude in the liveliest manner imaginable. And William, while he was rather stiffly cordial to my mother, and very gentlemanly toward Enoch, seemed less than charmed by the dinner chatter. He would quietly talk trusts and investments, and finish by handing my mother a check in the gilt-edged envelope of his firm, a bi-monthly mission which he only very rarely allowed the mails to perform Once he brought with him to dinner his oldest boy, a correct, wan-lidded adolescent with an artificial stammer, who was so submissively attentive to the rite of passing the croutons that I was horrified lest Enoch's imprecations, muttered bearishly into his soup, be overheard. To tell the truth, William's son fascinated me. He looked remarkably like a dog of a choice and venerable breed. His dark glazed head was too small for the padding in his shoulders, but otherwise I considered him formidably handsome, even elegant. He was known to be precocious: he already had an interest in jurisprudence and he carried under his arm a copy of Holmes'
The Common Law.
This reputation for intelligence, and the trick he had of faltering in the middle of a syllable, ravished me from the first moment. William's son seemed to me the image of brilliant commitment, of a confident yet enchanting dedication to dark philosophies—in short, of all that I might have been had my mother's marriage to her first husband endured. It was not that I wanted William for my father: I wished merely to have had him, in that preconscious time, for my sire. Since we are born at random, as an afterthought, or as an enigmatic consequence in a game of Truth, and are not willed into being by our begetters, they accordingly fall under the obligation of surrendering much of themselves to us, in the manner of forfeits; hence we are burdened not merely with their bone and blood, but with their folly and their folly's disguises. Nonetheless William's son had somehow been exempted from this fraudulent heirship, this pretense that we are auspicious inheritors when we are in reality only collectors grimly fetching what is due us:—those evils (dressed as gifts) which we are compelled to exact although we do not desire them. William's son was sound, he was fortunate, he had providentially escaped his birthright. I saw him as the brother I had lost through my mother's absurdity. The more so, since we shared the same surname.
    As is the custom with divorced women, in order to display her proper status my mother had retained the latter part of her marriage title against the time when she might acquire a new husband, and, with him, a new name. But after her separation from my father, she explained, she had reverted to the name she had carried as William's wife; she did not care to style herself, or me, after my father.