Free Trust by Cynthia Ozick

perceive at once that Marianna Harlow's passion for the workers was not unlike a former generation's devotion to tatting or playing the piano: it was an "accomplishment" Still, I thought it odd that no one ever saw my mother, in her maturity, flying about the world in aluminum airplanes without her husband, boring into one city after another in search of an ideal Vatican or Jerusalem of cities, as a kind of victim. She was like one of those god-kings chosen by lot among certain tribes, raised from infancy in fantastic luxury, emblazoned gorgeously in feathers and jewels, magnificently feasted and fattened at innumerable jubilations and sacred festivals, worshipped and called holy, ail his whims elaborately encouraged, looked-after, desired and fulfilled, his person made strangely autocratic, empowered to command every happiness but one, that of being left to live and to die in his own time—and led at last to the greatest celebration of all, his brutal and unbeautiful death by pounding of sacrificial clubs at the hands of those kind uncle's, the priests who had fed him splendor. My mother was as innocent as this, and as ambitious and arrogant; and in the same way she did not suspect that she was hated for her glories. It is true that money attracts; but much money repels. My mother was pillaged, looted, ravished and ravaged: men crept at her pockets like so many mice; she was cynically robbed by her superior servants, footmen, and beggars a hundred times over, and was cursed with every burglary. Hence her wildness and her pranks—like everyone else, she longed for the sensation of robbing Allegra Vand.
    I felt like one of those plunderers, going up the stairs in my jingling dress, noisy with my father's avarice, and sickened by McGovern's hackneyed exchanges. I could scarcely téli the two of them apart—McGovern and Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck; they were two birds of the same species perched upon my mother's shoulders talon-deep, one a fledgling of thirty years, no longer an amateur but not yet dangerous, the other invisible but shockingly present, a great sleek cruelly churlish falcon notched into her flesh for eternity: two terrible hawks. And William's son fluttering also, with his knowledgeable questions and his knowledgeable answers, pecking and probing into the money's secrets, as covetous as the rest—for a trust fund is labyrinthine as a cave, and as difficult to comprehend, and has room for the beatings of many bats. And the little blue-shod beauty too, kisses springing from her mouth high above the black dead river; and the dancers and musicians and maids laying waste the ballroom below—all of them chattering rapaciously on their little hanging chains in my mother's aviary, smelling up her money.
    In my room I tore off my dress—tore it off literally—and did not care that twenty tiny buttons glittered like scattered coins everywhere, or that the floorboards ran with silver and gold.
    I sat in the dark and tried to remember Europe. I remembered the freckled thumbs of my Dutch governess, and her little pink birdlike nostrils, and how she had fed me a queer shellfish they called
oursin
, which made me sick. To be sick at my stomach was to take after my father ... And I thought of Geneva, an unknown city, and Enoch negotiating with the Bulgarian whose cheek he had kissed above a fàlse brown beard.
    Enoch, my mother's darling, buyer of spies, up to that moment had not been bought.
    And then it seemed I heard him, as always before I had heard him—"There's nothing else to do," he said, "it can't be helped," he said, "we'll go ahead and do it." It was all a murmuring, low and dim, from my mother's room; but the violins were rising like smoke up the stairwell, and now and then the horn shrieked with the mad vacuity of a parrot: it was impossible to listen. I was sorry for her, stung with fever, moaning in her bed alone, while her party raged against her: she knew her guests, she had herself asked them one by one,