"He told her."

"He told her," my mother breathed. Her breath was a dog's breath; it was audible; I discovered myself in shame for its naked audibility; it was audible, it was pitifuL "He told her, Enoch?"

"Somebody had to tell her," Enoch said.

"I know, I know," she murmured, consenting, "I know."

"You delegated it and it was done."

"I didn't delegate it, I only decided with William-"

"The agent performs, the proxy acts. The trustee is surrogate. A case of behalfs adding up to the whole."

"Oh please don't start that sort of talk-"

"Myself neither gear nor cog in it, I warned you. When I favored the whole it was cloth I meant, whole truth being partial error, if I may reverse Lord Shaftesbury and Pope." But he was perfectly unsmiling.

"You, you're so detached," she flung out.

"Say it again if you want. Detached."

"Pedantic in a crisis!"

"A, there is no crisis. B, what other crisis behavior do you think plausible?"-and he suddenly began to chant, his big head listing piously: Don't be pedantic

When in a crisis.

Do be frantic,

For it stimulates your vices.

My mother halted in the middle of her circuit: "Enoch, you joke, you carry on, and meanwhile the whole world's changed-"

"Nothing's changed," he replied soberly.

"Mrs. Karp's better at it," I remarked.

He inquired, "Better at what?"

"Instant rhyming."

"My dear child, I have spent the last twenty years perfecting that verse. The only thing instant about it is your mother's disapproval. Nevertheless after removal of all visible syntax, I intend to submit it to Bushelbasket for editorial consideration. Not your mother's-her representative's: following her example, you see, with regard to responsibility."

"Enoch, will you listen to me? I did not delegate it, I only said if ever some day it had to be dealt with, I mean if it came up, if we had to, well, you wouldn't do it, and so he said, William said, if it happened he would. If we had to only."

"I recall it. I fail to see the logical 'we' in it. You should have done it yourself."

"It's a problem of law, it's for lawyers."

"I should rather call it a problem of family," he said lazily.

"All right then! Family!" she cried. "You're in it same as anyone if that's the case!"

"Ah, you're a step beyond the actual case," he noted.

"You could have told her yourself. I mean if you think it's so terrible about William doing it. William's nothing to her!"

"I am nothing to her."

"You're her stepfather, d.a.m.n it!"

"Precisely the step too far I had in mind," he bit off.

"Oh, you're cool about it," said my mother, folding her lip in tight upon her teeth, "nice and cool, aren't you? You're in it same as anyone! Deny it! You're the one said to pay him off in the first place, deny it! Eleven, twelve years ago, that time we talked the whole thing through, you came out with it right at the beginning-"

"You're missing that money? You're in need of it?"

"You're the one who made me give in to him."

"But we didn't have reasons, did we? L'acte gratuit it was. We did it for the love of him."

She stabbed feebly, "Oh stop it, don't say love like that, you're the one who made me."

"And viewing it retroactively, you would have preferred exposure? We didn't have a motivation good enough for Allegra-after-the-fact? You want to forget how we looked at every side and into the future and all around the thing?"

"Well she's pigged up anyway now, so Where's the difference?"

"Twelve safe years is the difference."

"But now she's pigged up anyway."

"I'm not pigged up," I said.

"The h.e.l.l you're not! I should never have given in to him in the first place. That was the mistake of it. Never give in to a thief." With dull guile she addressed my stepfather: "You're the one who made me give in to him in the first place. It's because I gave in to him."

"You gave in to him," he repeated. He often repeated phrases of hers, but with a conscious change of intonation which turned them sinister, even when he chose, as now vaguely yet too calculatedly he chose, to laugh. "Still," he considered it with the whole clandestine energy of his cleverness, "it depends on exactly which point in history you refer me to. As for our present circ.u.mstances, you're perfectly right, they wouldn't have their interest for us now if you hadn't given in to him in the first place. Only," he concluded, all wondering outstretched palms, "was Moscow the first place you gave in to him in? Or before that, the camp? G.o.d knows Brighton wasn't the first-"

She spat out at him full and fierce: "b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"-and a jewelled smear of spittle stood upright, webbed over her still open mouth, a flat skin of terrible shining bubble, like a valve.

I did not hesitate. "William's dirty word," I said quickly, to punish her.

But "I didn't mean you"-she took it as undeliberate, as a wicked accident of the feelings, as hideous confessional misappropriation, as every horror-"I didn't, I only meant oh G.o.d oh G.o.d," she sent out, grinding crescents into the carpet on humped knees, sinking her head into the bedcovers. Her eyes, going down in milky shadow, yielded momentary points of warty light and drowned. "I meant I gave in to pay him. I mean that."

I said impatiently, "I know it. You paid him and paid him."

"It was to keep him away."

"I know all that."

"We kept him away, we kept his name from you-" She carried her face up for a second's surveillance of mine. Her nostrils appeared briefly to collapse, then muscled out to leak streaming transparencies: "And for this, for this!"

"I know his name. Plenty of names he has," I said.

"For this," she gave out, swallowing deep among sheets. "I thought you'd be free of that, I always meant you to be free, you were supposed to be free," and clanged out a fearful drone: Enoch jumped with alarm.

"The stupidity of this," he urged. "Get up. Don't be a fool, Allegra. Stand up," and stood himself: the atlas flashed down between his legs like a fan or hand of cards, flicking out nations, pink, purple, orange, green, and lavender-blue waters anch.o.r.ed and split by hyphens; suddenly it showed Brazil, brownish, bloblike, supine under the chair, and Enoch leaned and spoke into flesh bunched under one horrified eye: "How stupid you are."

My mother answered with a live tone like a tuning fork. "Oh G.o.d oh G.o.d oh G.o.d," she snaked out with a queer clamor, half noise half voicelessness, "why now, what I want to know is why now, after a lifetime why now?" And then began that wailing, never-to-be-forgotten, which inhabited her for minutes without rest, without insistence but rather as an immanence, as though by right, and therefore curiously tiresome, which in fact I have already described: how she dashed herself upon herself; how she splintered fingernails into tissue; how she bowled bracelets up and down her arms; how her elbows declared themselves to be two idols of fate, knifing air and bed and Enoch; how she played Out her long lung in bawlings that coa.r.s.ened her speech for a day; how she wept, how she wept, because I knew she had paid and paid, and had never been divorced because never married to that father who had plenty of names but none left over for me: because I knew; and she wept for an hour because I knew. "Why now, why now, just tell me, after a lifetime why now..."

And Enoch said: "Whose lifetime? Yours? Not yours. Think, allow yourself to think."

"Still, still, after so long keeping it down, we kept it down so long, it doesn't make sense why now-"

"If not now, when?" my stepfather said at the end of it.

My mother raised herself. She was ugly. Her lids were fat as lips. She was silent.

"He would have told her all the same," Enoch said.

"Nick? Nick you mean?" she wondered, straining to chirp at him: "That's who you mean?"

"Probably it's why he wants her. To give it to her in his own way."

My mother brought up a single sound without meaning; she kneeled lower and straightened her ankle so that a nervous snap clicked in it. "Ah, but it's terrible now. To send her knowing," she croaked from the mattress-heart, "it's criminal to send her knowing."

"Criminal," he mocked, "to send a daughter to a father?"

"It's not just a daughter to a father any more. It's sending her knowing. Look, go ahead and simplify, the more you simplify the more complex you make everything."

"I am not without my gifts," he wearily agreed.

"Sending to a father is one thing, when you send that way it's all right; but now it's sending to a crook, just like that, out in the open, nothing to cover it up," my mother pursued, "it's exactly like making her into an accomplice-"

"To whom?" he challenged.

She suppressed her answer under a fragmentary whine.

"If you mean to us-" But he did not finish; instead he threw out at her dangerously, "Well then don't send her."

My mother looked at me with what I recognized as a new timidity.

"I'm going all the same," I said.

"Ah," she p.r.o.nounced, and took in Enoch with pursy violated eyes. "There, hear that? She wants to, hear that? There, she wants to, for your sake."

"For his sake," I said, crafty to mislead her.

"You see, Enoch, for your sake," my mother repeated.

"No: for Nick's sake," I amended. "He's the one that wants me."

"Oh, he wants you, all right," my mother said, snuffing up a spasm of breath. "It's perfectly plain he wants you. Only don't get the idea it's all for your own sake-"

"For G.o.d's sake," Enoch objected, slapping his hands to his temples.

"But you see? I said accomplice. Twitch an eye and isn't she ready to join up in a minute on the other side? Sweetheart," she parried, "he's a crook. He always was a crook. Look how he's threatening Enoch-you know about this business don't you? I mean now you understand all about it, right?"

"Maybe he does it just to get me. n.o.body ever let him get near me any other way, so maybe he does it just to get me. Because he wants me," I said again.

"Idiot. He doesn't want you, it's me he wants to get at. He wants trouble. Well look, what he really wants is revenge," she stated, "on me, don't think I'm going to be obtuse about it He thinks he has plenty to get even with, that's why. -That time in Europe."

"What time?" Enoch said.

"The whole time. The whole time he was in Europe. The whole war I mean."

"Sure. You made the war just to spite him."

"Well indirectly we all did, that's your idea, isn't it? To spite ourselves. Humankind brutalizing itself. So I suppose I was in on it too. Don't ridicule, he's never forgotten and never forgiven, you know that." She scrambled herself erect and confronted us with her mouth pointed into a deliberate argument of openness, like a trapezoid. "I came safe home myself, that's why, and never got him out of there, and ever since what's it been but a simple case of getting even? That's all he's after. It was a simple question of, of"-she swiveled quickly to shatter Enoch with her high ruined declarative-"abandonment. Say what you want, it's true, that's just what it was, abandonment Nothing else. Because I left him there."

"You left him there," Enoch admitted.

"Well it's true, go ahead, try to deny it. There I was safe in America and there he was G.o.d knows where."

"Sure," Enoch said. "n.o.body denies that."

"And I don't feel bad about it even one little bit. I would do it all over again, the same way if I had to. The point is"-she fixed on me, daring me to be indifferent-"well the whole point is I could have got him out of there if I tried harder, well not just me, but this bank I had dealings with at that time and William didn't lift a finger either ... not that that's why I decided to abandon him though. He was a crook, out and out. He wasn't worth getting out of there. -You remember Anna? That girl we had for you when you were little? When I marched you over there right after the war?"

"Anneke," I said, distracted that she should suppose impermanence in me of a vividness of fear.

"That's the one, you always did do her name with a good accent-she practically made a foreigner out of you anyhow, the way you picked up the language over there. Of course you were born on that side of the water, that probably has something to do with it. You remember we sent her away? He was pumping her for information, naturally at that age you wouldn't realize that. Once a crook always a crook, that's the point, you follow? He came right up to us and right out with it and asked for money, that's the calibre he is, you follow? Well I knew all that, practically from the beginning. He didn't make a fool out of me, maybe out of plenty of others, but not out of me. Out of the blue I went home and left him. Pure and simple out of the blue. He never knew what hit him, you see what I mean. You don't get over a shock of that nature, and ten years later he turns up nearly insane with spite, not a normal man by anyone's standards, and asks for money. As far as that girl goes, well that was all vicarious, that's what I mean by not normal. What do you call it again? Enoch? In psychology?"

He waited with nostrils shrewd and stretched wide. "Call what?"