Trust by Cynthia Ozick

off with a lie. And yet not really, if what he had said were to be taken as metaphor and not invention. For the museum on Town Island, looked after so assiduously by my mother's checks, was Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: and a man can be said to be a museum. Surely my father, constituting present evidence of a buried time, was a sort of museum—he housed matters which had to be dug after, collected bit by bit, and reconstructed. And William, as curator, had determined that the museum was to remain closed to the public, closed even to his son and prospective law partner. Whatever it was he guarded he must have considered either very horrible or very fragile—perhaps both, as, for instance, a shrunken head. He would do anything to prevent its exposure; he would even declare (if it might in some fashion appear helpful) that he was a headhunter himself.
    But it made me hesitate. William as headhunter or trafficker in imprudence, William as liar, was unimaginable: here was a man who shunned novels on the ground that they are always fictitious. And yet he had defrauded his son of knowledge; what difference if it were the knowledge of evil? It was perhaps the first falsehood poor William had ever discharged in all his life. I could no longer regard him as incorruptible. The touch of greed carried far, it seemed; my father's touch carried far. It was not possible to conceal or elude it without defilement. I thought how money-lust spawns deceit even among mere watchers or bystanders, and saw my father as owning some iron god or demon nourished by the taste of purity and panting after innocents with his long iron tongue, licking them to rust and corrosion at last. This was one of the creatures, neither legendary nor extinct nor caged, who roamed about the halls of that museum which William had fearfully closed to the public, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck's museum: the cost of the exhibit was too high, and the admission price was ferocious. What you paid was yourself. In order to get in you had to join the bad and dirty things on display: you had to change and be one of them. And William, who had entered and seen and learned how the rust of iron decays on the hands, and the rust of truth in the mouth, would not permit his son to enter, see, or team.
    Though I pitied William, I continued to smile: in trying to preserve his son's illusions (that man was not depraved, that no Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck existed), he had passed himself off for a cheat and a crook—and broke thereby the last illusion his son had retained in the world.

9
    Early in the morning all the next week Enoch came out on the terrace to dictate to his secretary. He put his feet up on the railing and talked into the sky while I lay nearby, listening. It sounded like a military history or plan—there was mention of trenches, border-points, atomic warheads—but since the rivers were called X and Y, the towns Redplace, Whiteplace, and Greyplace, and the generals Tweedle and Twaddle, it was impossible to know what part of the globe he was describing.
    By Thursday Tweedle had advanced within three miles of Twaddle's encampment behind Whiteplace, and Twaddle was beginning to think of retreating.
    On Friday, however, the young man reverted to delivery boy and carried away, one by one, four great boxes full of books. "That's as much boning up as I intend to do right now," Enoch said.
    "Is it for the hearings?" I inquired. "All that reading?"
    "One doesn't read for a purpose. One simply reads," he told me, affecting amusement.
    "And the report?"
    "There was no report."
    "But you've been dictating for days."
    "I never dictate. It's contrary to my temperament. I merely recommend." And he went in, smiling, to join my mother.
    I did not accompany him; my mother's single wish was to avoid me. She had said she had hoped I would always live freely, and without perceiving her meaning I caught the guilty regret in her voice. Left alone on the terrace, I amused myself with guessing at her visions.