Trust Read Free Page A

As a result, while my mother through her third alliance had long ago become Mrs. Vand, I continued to be called after her first husband. I was generally believed to be William's child. My father was by this means virtually obliterated from our lives, since I was not permitted even to bear his name. For many years it was not revealed to me: I discovered it by chance myself one afternoon, when, rummaging in Enoch's desk for a stamp, I came upon an empty envelope, the address run over in a watered and rusted ink. Some notion about the handwriting, which was educated but wild, as though scratched on by fingers used to grosser movements, made me search after the sender. He appeared to have been reluctant to record himself plainly; not only was he absent from the face of the envelope, but from the back, and when I found him at last, it was in a hidden place, on the inside of the flap, a little furtive and blurred by the glue:
Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck
Duneacres
Town Island
New York
    That this was my father I was convinced at once, although I was fleetingly put off by the starkness of his lodging, for I had imagined him as living under a congestion of tenement flats in a far and uncongenial, perhaps sinister, city. It had always been my idea that my father was some sort of artist—or perhaps a kind of sailor, a voyager or adventurer—although no one had ever told me this. I supposed him to be improvident, impoverished, and discreditable; I was given to understand, subtly and by prudent indirection, that he was a great embarrassment to us all. My school applications had always cautiously evaded mention of him, and I can recall awkward conversations when, looking away, I did not dare to deny my interlocutor's convenient assumption of William's paternity. It was a substantial relief to pretend to a relation with William, who was red-faced, jut-chinned, and white-haired, like an elderly and reliable monument toward which one has patriotic feelings. I thought of my father, on the other hand, as dun and dank and indecent and somewhat yellowish; I thought he had yellow-tarred teeth, and a porous nose, and bad eyes. At the same time it seemed perfectly plausible that such a man might be a genius. The nature of his talent my imagination did not explore, it being quite enough that I saw the man himself as moist and dirty, quartered in a moist and dirty cellar, in the manner of geniuses. It was not inconceivable that he might be an inventor, and I even believed it likely that he was a foreigner, since the only thing certain I knew of him was that he had marched with my mother in Moscow. That she, with all her gaiety, her fabrications, her enthusiasms, her adorations, could have been attracted to the repugnant wretch I had fashioned did not, to be sure, seem altogether reasonable. And yet it was not impossible: she was stupid enough to talk romantically of "indeterminate taints" and "vital sparks " and she was quick to spot, in queer people whom everyone else avoided, "un homme de génie." Still, I had no real reason for my judgment that my father was in some way singular, or at the least unorthodox. I had only my guilty instinct for his character. Sometimes, when my mother would stare at me in a certain apprehensive way—her painted eyebrows pulled together in a cosmetic frown—it would seem to me that I was wrong, or crooked, or even bizarre; and that some source of error in me, so perverse and elusive that I was not myself sensible of it, had reminded her of my father. But immediately afterward she would be laughing again. "It's not like the fairy tale, you know, where you can tell the king by the mark on his breast!" she took up mockingly. "I'm sure / don't speak of that person from one year to the next—though that's not the point." In spite of her hilarity—acrid and nervous and somehow shackled—I could not see what she insisted
was
the point. Nevertheless she did not deny the truth of my surmise. She only demanded that I explain