Free Trust by Cynthia Ozick Page A

she knew the terror of them all. And she lay talking to her ghosts, saying her piece, and saying Enoch's piece, and pouring a burden of gold and silver upon my back, and gold and silver into the hands of Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck, and softly gnashing her lamentations in Enoch's voice, a voice so very like his that I went down the hall, the better to hear it—"There's nothing else to do," I heard, "we'll go ahead and do it," I heard, "is there anything left for us to do but this?"
    My mother was sitting up in bed, rigid, her hair like needles or rays or cobras' tongues slowly stabbing toward the ceiling. She moved vaguely but jaggedly, in a stirring too stiff to be called rocking, too brief for swaying—it was almost infantile. The lamp was lit—it stood on her dresser, on the far side of thé room near the bathroom door, and I wondered whether she had left her bed to turn it on. But she was still tightly wound in the coverlet, and when I came near to touch it I felt the fever-heat in every fold.
    She heaved—I followed the crest and trough of her wide back—and her head came over, unpropelled, and she saw me. "You're in your slip!" she croaked, with the quick awareness of the sick; "why do you come in here like that? Go down, do you think I give parties for nothing? Go down," she raved, and I thought at first she was much worse, for her skin had the slipperiness of certain deep illnesses which drive out personality.
    I told her that my dress had torn in the dancing, and I had come upstairs to don another.
    "It was the train," she concluded hoarsely. "Somebody stepped on that damn train. I knew the moment you tried it on it was no good. It was a cheat, in spite of that built-in brassiere, a cheat absolutely, I don't caret I could shoot that old woman, Baroness only maybe, I wish they had shot her with her whole family together, even supposing she's not real—those gangsters, those thieves! Twenty-one years of open robbery! What does she know about dressing a young girl, I told her I had always protected you from politics and sinning—they're the same, don't you think I know that by now? It's not as though I left out telling her—my young girl, I said, in America they are younger ... how old are you?" she broke off suddenly, and I said my age in the interval she offered me, and then again she called out across the room, "She's old enough to take care of herself, you see? It's all right then, shell take care of herself'—nevertheless it was nothing like delirium. Manifestly it was a calculated recitation for an audience: it had the ring of the concert hall. "Eight hundred dollars, and torn—to shreds, did you say?" she descended finally, mumbling, "I knew from the first moment, believe me, a run of sheet metal, pieces of eight, the U.S. Mint, In God We Trust..."
    Underneath it all there were irony and the distortions of some unimaginable and overwhelming anger. Her eyes were at the same time receded and protuberant, like out-of-the-way buttons or switches purposely removed from the anterior on account of their terrible potential; they controlled a machine at once subtle and fearful. And it was as though someone had indeed come and charged those awful round swellings, her unhappy eyes, and set off the perilous machine: my mother's pale arms emerged from the windings of her sheets and flailed the air; her mouth chattered like a motor. It soon came to me that her ragings, which" shook her still, were not those of sickness or fever. She was claimed by something else. A wilderness of tears complicated her already laborious face; her thin nose narrowed. It was a weeping that assaulted her, no access of mere fever and sickness. She ailed with an extraordinary bitterness. It was strange to see. I had been witness, all my life, to my mother's good humor: her laughter was both captivating and abashing—it sometimes shamed me But now I heard those shrill and abstract bawlings, wordless as a child's, and I felt deceived to have