"Because the committee hearings are public!" I threw across at him. But in spite of spite I wondered at his words: long ago my mother too had had to speak of "terms."

"Precisely," William concluded. "Hearings of this sort are entirely public. They are self-righteously public. In public the committee represents a formalism, though not quite a formality. That is because political decisions are arrived at neither formally nor publicly. The witnesses will have been selected with a view toward the presentation of the most favorable impression. Put it that the witnesses will lean, they will have a particular tendency. They will argue a long and admirable record, which exists. Which exists: don't mistake me. Undeniably such a record exists."

"You tell everything," I taunted. "You tell everything but what I came for."

But he did not pause. "The other matters they will pa.s.s over. They will pa.s.s over whatever in the record is less favorable, because privately and informally the Senators will already have pa.s.sed over it beforehand. Before, you understand, the public hearings."

"Then there won't be a fuss," I gave out, irritated with his surface mood. "How nice for my mother, how nice for Enoch, how lovely, how delicious, I mean for the two of them: but what difference does it make to me? They've got the Amba.s.sadorship: say they've got it, William. The President wants it, the committee hands it over, and isn't that enough for them? To run half the Western world? You'd think that would be enough even for her! But on top of it they've got to ship me off, and n.o.body'll tell me why. They won't tell me why."

To my surprise I discovered he had been staring at me all the while. "The plan dismays you that much? You dislike going that much?"

It seemed it was the first time he had thought of me.

"Oh, I don't care."

"You don't care? Please, you contradict yourself now."

"What else would I be doing anyhow?" I said limply. "Sitting perfectly still. Reading the papers."

"How sullen you are," William reflected, as though capitulating, and dropped his hand flat. "You are not like your mother. At your age she had enthusiasms."

"All the Action Committees, and being a revolutionary. Ho," I said. "Hum. New Oxford Street and Adam Gruenhorn."

But he was unexpectedly stirred: "Undoubtedly she was carried away, and I will not say I could ever approve it, yet it's to her credit in a way. I acknowledge that. It speaks well of her intent."

"It's all so silly, it seems so dated. -My mother especially. She comes out of it a bore."

"The opposite. The opposite. It gave her a spiritual vividness. To be mistaken out of hopefulness hardly mitigates the wrong, yet unlike so many others of no background she was not mistaken out of malice. The rest wanted to avenge themselves on the privileged, as though any position of privilege in society has not been well-earned. But through it all your mother had a sense of herself, she had the self-esteem of numerous industrious generations that is not egotism but is inbred, she had a fancy in favor of engaging herself to the significant act. She had a willingness for good, in spite of a tragic definition of good, and you see all the tragedy that came of it. She has that same willingness today, she will engage herself vitally, she is capable of trying on diverse forms of life-" He stopped, and relieved himself, by means of a destroying blink, of the long attachment of my amazement. He had fallen through surface into whirlpools. He was loyal still. He said: "That is why she wants the Amba.s.sadorship." He examined me. "You are not like your mother."

"Am I like my father?"

"See for yourself."

"Go without a peep, you mean. Get shipped."

"If you value your stepfather you have no choice."

"Oh, value," I said-but this was merely filler, and I might just as well have muttered "Oh, choice," and been as meaningful.

"If you value him as Amba.s.sador."

"That's the way she values him. Don't expect the same of me, I'm not like my mother," I reminded him, "you've told me so twice."

"How rude you are. Rude and sullen. You will go if you. value your mother."

"And should I value, my father too?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"He's the only one who seems to value me."

"Yes, he has always established a price on you." He all at once evaded the contents of my face. "Understand me. I don't purpose to make a wound, but here as with most things of the world we are confronted by a business exchange which requires the business mind. You should demonstrate an att.i.tude in accordance with that"

"Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck doesn't have a business mind," I intervened, inexplicably defensive. "He's no good for business. It sounds like he was good for the Action Committees before he got tired of them. Maybe he was good for New Oxford Street and all those parades and Moscow and Sweden. That's all he was good for then, and now I guess there's nothing he's good for." I considered. "Do the Senators know about New Oxford Street and the Action Committees? And Adam Gruenhorn? And my mother? And Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck? And everything years and years ago?"

"They know it alL They are familiar with everything."

"And it's all right? They don't object?"

"The business mind never objects when its own advantage is at stake. Not all the Senators are tailors and watchmen, even metaphorically: which is to say that not all the Senators are fools. They have recognized these items as topically inflammatory but topically worthless. They pa.s.s over New Oxford Street because it is too tangential to count, and too dangerous to bring up. The public is interested in the worthless and the inflammatory, but the Senators are interested in what is useful. They will not take it on themselves to bring the worthless and the inflammatory to th notice of the public. They are not ign.o.ble. They regard Vand as a proper candidate not for his biography but for his usefulness. They regard him as sound-sounder than most He's been through the mill, as Ta.s.sel says: knows the other political philosophy firsthand. If he doesn't like it it's not because the Government tells him not to. He knows why he doesn't like it because he has been in it He has been in it and recanted. Moreover he recanted years before it was the fashion to recant-that's in his favor. He has been through all the blandishments, and come out on the other side. Not clean: to my mind n.o.body can come out of that philosophy cleaner than one who has never been attracted to it: but of course the Senators are not interested in lifelong purity; they are interested in usefulness. The pure and the useful are not always identical. Sang-froid is an acquisition to be earned by a journey through dirt, so to speak, and the dirt has clung. An Amba.s.sador, like steel, should be an alloy."

"Ill tell that to Enoch. Good alloys make good allies, h.e.l.l say."

"You're laughing," William observed.

"Because you're not. A minute ago you were complaining he wasn't typical enough, and now you praise him just for that. And you don't see the joke."

"The necessities of politics praise him: I don't. He has talent, he has merit. And his talent and his merit are wonderfully attuned to the necessities. If they were at odds with the necessities it would be a comedy perhaps. But there is nothing absurd or comic in the congruent. Furthermore there is another vitally congruent element: he has money available to him. There is no joke in money. There never will be. In this case the money is part of the merit-they wouldn't have him without the money. The post is one of the more expensive ones-surely that's plain on the face of things. It couldn't be run on talent alone. Merit can't staff an emba.s.sy building. Luckily he is as well-known abroad for the availability of the money as he is for having had, all these months, the ear of the man who has the ear of the President. In the past he has made both those ears ring. No doubt you have followed that for yourself. But you continue to laugh. I believe I am offended by it. I amuse you?"

"No. The money does. There's a joke in the money after all." A shrewd intimation, an inward scar of awe, lifted me beyond the lamp, and I saw not William's but my grandfather's mouth, sea-obsessed. Had it been live flesh and not oil-sailor's lore that oil and water do not mix-it would have watered at my thought. I said: "She's buying him the Amba.s.sadorship."

"You offend. You offend very much."

"Now there's n.o.body she hasn't bought."

"Vand was bought-'bought,' if you will-to be a father, as I have said, for you. An unsuccessful transaction. As I have said. The locution is vulgar and I don't accede to it. But she has bought, in that sense, no one else."

"You," I said. "She pays you."

"She pays her attorney. I am her attorney."

"Well? But she pays."

"In my capacity as trustee of a difficult estate I encounter and disburse your mother's money," he answered, but with an anger too small to arouse him. Or perhaps, since the subject was business, he kept himself businesslike: "In spite of that the nature of my relationship to your mother is wholly fiducial."

"Financial?"

"Fiducial. A matter of faith."

"Of commerce, you mean. Every word you say to her she has to pay for. You get your cut out of everything. And now if she has to buy the Amba.s.sadorship for Enoch there's nothing to choose between you and him. She just goes ahead and pays everybody. Up to now I didn't think Enoch had to be paid for; and now it's even Enoch. She pays for everyone. She pays the whole world. She has to pay to keep alive. She has to bribe the air to let her breathe. She has to pay for what other people get for free. It's better to be poor. It's better to be poor and be a blackmailer. It's less humiliating."

"I a.s.sure you that for your mother nothing would be more humiliating than not to be the wife of the Amba.s.sador. What she provides she provides willingly. A poor man cannot be Amba.s.sador. An Amba.s.sador cannot be poor."

"He can't be poor, he can't be pure," I recited. "Does that cover all the requisites?"

-He sealed his eyes.

"He can't be dour? But Enoch's thoroughly dour. I told you, he's bleak. You thought I said oblique. But oblique doesn't always fit him; only sometimes; when he wants to he can go straight to the point, I've heard him. Sometimes he goes straight to the point and he's a boor. My mother says so. She tells him he attacks his soup like a boor. He tips his plate the wrong way, that's alL Does the committee know that? He's an impure dour poor boor-wholl tell the committee that? I bet that's something they haven't found out! And you say they know everything. He eats his soup like an ex-Communist dupe-"

"If you persist in hysteria-"

"It isn't hysteria, it's rhymes, like Mrs. Karp. I'm acc.u.mulating character traits for the Amba.s.sadorship. My mother's money, Enoch's brains, the President's a.s.sistant's ear-"

"-and a host country that wants him. I suggest you hear me out finally. I suggest it very seriously."

"Sure," I said, mainly because it rhymed with pure, poor, and dour.

He did not trouble himself to finish the various adornments of his frown: he simply proceeded. "The Foreign Office people over there are unmistakably after him-it's still another factor immensely in his favor that they want him, they are distinctly eager to get him. I have this from the Senator; it is undoubtedly true. And there has been, in addition, a hinting note from the Prime Minister actually, though usually he likes to keep hands off for fear of being misunderstood by the Senators. But the Senators are not fools," he brought out for the second time, in a voice burdened by an unwilling urgency that filled eerily with echoes of itself. He had said all this already. It was as though he were insisting all over again, and more ominously than before, that the committee hearings were public. He had made it intensely and perilously plain that they were public. "Not all the Senators are fools. If they are left alone they will pa.s.s over whatever needs to be pa.s.sed over," he ended, but without the tone of ending.

I marveled at his repet.i.tions. "If the Senators are left alone?" I asked. "You mean by the Prime Minister?"

"I mean by Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck," he said, and now at last I heard him carried down by the sound of ending, and he ended what he had set out to say, and gave me what I had come for.

But what I had come for was no more than what I had come with: my father's names. We were all at once cast back from the public to the private: notch by notch along the greedy wheel of things we had arrived once more at my father's names. Meanwhile I observed that the wheel was rigged, like a lottery disk at a cheating carnival, which brings the same number always to the member of the house: but the member of the house, though a conspirator, is masked like myself to represent an innocent, and summons not through luck but through artfulness.

William said: "He wants to throw it all open."

"All?"

"Absolutely everything."

I began to enumerate: "The Action Committees, New Oxford Street, Moscow-"

"That isn't quite everything."

"But if the Senators know everything-"

"The public doesn't. He has made detailed promises to secure that the public will. Your stepfather has had a.s.surances from him."

"There was a letter," I said, "and Enoch wouldn't let me see it. Was that the one?"

He ignored me. "He has named three prominent newspapers in three cities. Each is a hostile and influential political force. Whatever the Senators are willing to overlook, you may be certain that figures connected with these newspapers will not What has been kept down for twenty years will emerge in an afternoon. In an hour."

A scrub of enlightenment ascended in me: "Because the committee hearings are public," I said.

"Everything will become public. Nothing will be omitted. The public will eat Mr. and Mrs. Vand alive."

"Mrs. Vand?" I said.

"They will lick her clean."

"Mrs. Vand doesn't have any politics."

"Neither does the public. You don't imagine the public has the remotest notion of how the Senate goes about qualifying Amba.s.sadors? Or cares?-Politics will be the least of it."

"And what will the most be?" I said in bewilderment.

He gave a great heave. "Even the Senators are not aware of it. We have evaded scandal ingeniously. About you the a.s.sumption has been the usual one: the child of a second marriage which terminated in divorce. Don't you see," he pressed out, "we have tried to keep you free, we have done everything for your safety, we have never permitted his breath on you, we have paid him and paid him-"

"Oh," I said. "You mean Brighton. He'll tell about Brighton."

The criminal phrase disgraced the air.

"It might have been regularized. It might have been minimized," said William, moving in his chair. The leather writhed and bleated. "If Vand had adopted. From the start I recommended adoption. But he refused. He could not be persuaded. As a result the matter remains as it was. As it was. Yet something might have been salvaged. You would have had a name."

"I have your name."

"You have no name."

His fierceness was that of a flagellant. He hoisted himself; he rose; he stood mortified, his arc of forehead shining absurdly. A photographer would have powdered it; a painter would have made a still life of it: it seemed a purposefully barren bowl awaiting the stroke of a single leaf. Then I saw on the white flank of the temple an apparition of leaf: the fuzzy elm-like oval of a track of sweat He said: "I think there is nothing left now. We are finished. You have it all."

Seeing his fear I was afraid. "He won't take money? Tilbeck? Can't he take money? Why not money?"

"He will always take money. This time money is insufficient. He wants you."

"I know that I know, they've told me that But why there? In that place? Does he live there?"

"He squats there. He comes and goes, there is no one to stop him. It is an empty house. It has not been kept up. Perhaps it tumbles. He does as he likes."

"He's the one who's free," I said.

But William had pulled the chain of the lamp. The doork.n.o.b whined at the neck. "He used the place often before we learned of it The first we knew was when he directed the money to be sent there. He has the caprice of a demon." The darkness, though enlarging him, presented me with a pudding of William, wavering against a distant tiny light. The room beyond was vacant and warm and smelled spent. Paper cups lay glinting in the aisles between the desks like Viking debris in a deserted hall. The engagement party had dispersed itself: Cabbages, Onions, law clerks, all those young men who had once come down in vain from Cambridge to wish me bon voyage. "What he wants," William said dimly, "is to hara.s.s. That's all he ever wanted: to hara.s.s. To a man who has no power hara.s.sment is power. He envies power. He works on whatever the occasion offers. I hear a sound. A tick." Tick tick tick. A minuscule mammal chirp.

It was the sodden nap of the carpet, seeping.

I said in the doorway: "Someone ought to hara.s.s him back."

"Don't take it on yourself!" William answered.

"Oh, not me. I'm only barter," I said. "I'm ransom. I might as well be a sack of money."

-"Is someone there?" someone called. "Anybody left over? Who is it?"

At the mouth of a far cubicle, sharp as though inked there, a pair of tombs embraced.

"Now it's clear," I pursued. "They're sending me to save Enoch."

"I bet it's a joke. I bet it's a trick. It must be a left-over Cabbage. They hide out for a surprise. Hey! We can't see you. You a Cabbage out there?" A metal dipper came whirling like a spoke down the corridor; it missed our pioneering shadows by half an inch and fell clattering against a desk. "Go home!"

William's voice emerged from the reverberation: "To save the Amba.s.sadorship."

"To save my mother, if it comes to that."

"Cabbages go home!" The tombs leaned apart, then joined in a single new shape: an uneven obelisk. "Privacy's wanted!"

"It has come to that. It has come to that," William said.

"Oh listen," cried Miss Pettigrew, "it's your father I think."