Trust, page 3
It was not uncommon for Americans abroad to avoid one another. Not only because, according to an unspoken protocol, it was the tactful thing to do, but also because no one wanted to be perceived as friendless in Europe and provincially dependent on acquaintances from back home. Well aware of this code, Mrs. Brevoort made use of it and became a courier of sorts among the self-isolated foreigners who heartily welcomed her services, which allowed them to sustain their pretense of aloof autonomy. She was the person to turn to for a much-desired introduction that, in other hands, would have been an awkward affair; she mended broken bonds and created new ones; she managed to include people in select circles while, crucially, preserving the sense that these circles were closed; she was, everyone agreed, a peerless anecdotalist and a consummate matchmaker.
Traveling alongside mountains, by the sea, or through cities (following the seasons), and staying, lingering, or making haste (following convenience), the Brevoorts drew the map of their own peculiar Grand Tour. Mr. Brevoort devoted most of this time to tutoring his daughter and seeking out different mystical circles—spiritism, alchemy, mesmerism, necromancy, and other forms of occultism had become his all-absorbing concerns. Helen was already heavyhearted to have lost a friend and her only European companion in her father, but it was around this time that her spirits sank to new depths: she was older, well-read, and educated enough to realize that Leopold was becoming a hoarder of nonsense. She was being displaced by dogmas and creeds that a few years before would have been the object of their shared ridicule and served as inspiration for their absurd tales. It was sad enough to see her father drift away, but it was crushing to find her respect for his intellectual worth vanish with him.
Still, Mr. Brevoort was not altogether oblivious of his daughter’s talents. A few years into their travels, he had to admit that her aptitude for languages, numbers, biblical hermeneutics, and what he called her mystical intuitions had developed beyond his abilities, and he started planning part of the family’s itinerary around various scholars who could further her education. This brought them to humble boardinghouses in small country villages or hostels in the suburbs of university towns where mother, father, and daughter were forced to spend time with only one another for company. Isolated and out of their element, Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort became quarrelsome and mean. Helen retreated further into herself, and her silence opened up a battleground for her parents’ increasingly acrid arguments. Still, when the time finally came for the interview with an illustrious professor or an authority on the occult, a transformation always took place in Helen. She was suddenly crystalline with confidence—something about her hardened, shone, and sharpened.
Whether in the center of Jena, the fringes of Toulouse, or the suburbs of Bologna, the routine remained, for the most part, the same. They hired rooms at an inn, where Mrs. Brevoort claimed some sort of indisposition that demanded bed rest, while Mr. Brevoort took his daughter to see the great man who had brought them there. Leopold Brevoort’s lengthy and for the most part unintelligible introductions always made their host look at him and his daughter with apprehension and regret. Not only had his doctrines become quite arcane, but they were delivered in a hodgepodge of mostly fictional French, German, and Italian. Some of these academics and mystics were impressed by Helen’s intimate knowledge of Scripture, her scholarly attainments, and her fluency in different esoteric dogmas. Sensing their interest, Mr. Brevoort would try to say something, but he was stopped by a raised palm and ignored for the rest of the interview. A few of these tutors asked him to leave the room. And some, with pedagogical warmth, grabbed Helen’s leg but soon withdrew their hands, frightened by her lethal impassiveness and unyielding glare.
HELEN HAD LEFT HER CHILDHOOD in Albany. Being constantly on the move, she met few girls her age, and those casual encounters never had a chance to blossom into full friendships. To pass the time, she taught herself languages with books she shifted between different homes and hotels—she would take a copy of La Princesse de Clèves from a bookcase in Nice and then reshelve it in a library in Siena after removing from it I viaggi di Gulliver, with which she filled the gap created by borrowing Rot und Schwarz in Munich. Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors. When books proved insufficient, she turned to her diary. The dream journals her father had made her keep for a few years had instilled in her the daily habit of recording her thoughts. Over time, as he stopped reading her entries, her writing turned away from her dreams and toward her musings on books, her impressions of the cities they visited, and, during her white nights, her innermost fears and yearnings.
Early in her youth, a quiet but decisive event took place. She and her parents were staying at Mrs. Osgood’s villa in Lucca. Helen had been walking through the grounds and then, stunned by the heat, around the empty house. They were the only guests. The servants scurried away at the sound of her steps. A dog, splayed out on the cool terra-cotta floor, its half-open eyes staring into its cranium, was having convulsive dreams. She looked into the drawing room: her father and Mr. Osgood had fallen asleep in their armchairs. Helen felt softly vicious, possessed by a vague desire to do harm. She realized she was peering through the bottom of boredom. There was violence on the other side. She turned on her heels and went back out into the garden. As she reached the shady spot where her mother and her host were having lemonade, she simply announced that she was going for a stroll in town. Perhaps because her tone was so peremptory, perhaps because her mother was in the middle of an emphatically whispered conversation with Mrs. Osgood, or perhaps because hazel-and-copper Lucca glowed with benevolence that afternoon, there was no objection—just a quick side glance from Mrs. Brevoort, who told her daughter to enjoy her passeggiata but not to go too far. And so, unnoticed by everyone other than herself, a new chapter began for Helen. For the first time in her life, she was out in the world on her own.
She barely paid attention to the country road and its surroundings, lost in her fulfilled dream of independence, but she was woken up by the stuccoed silence that first met her in town. The dry echo of her shoes on the cobblestones was all she could hear in the empty streets. Every few steps, she gently dragged a foot, just to feel the skin on her neck tingle with delight at the murmur of leather on stone. With each block, the small city became livelier. Trying to prolong the sense of elation she had found in the initial stillness, she walked on, with buoyant aplomb, away from the voices crashing at distant intersections, away from the mercantile clatter coming from the square, away from the liquid hoofbeats clip-clopping around the corner, away from the women yelling from window to window as they unpinned their laundry, and into alleyways with houses shuttered against the heat, where she could hear, again, her solitary steps. She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.
Trying to avoid the hubbub of the square, where some sort of jubilee or religious festa was now taking place, Helen found herself on a street with a few shops. One of them was a double anachronism. A photographic studio could only be an incongruity in that small city, with its Etruscan past that made medieval churches feel new. But on closer inspection, this dissonant apparition from the future revealed itself to be, in fact, old. The portraits in the window, the cameras on display, the services offered—all remitted to the early days of photography. And somehow, Helen experienced those thirty or fifty years by which the shop was outdated more acutely than the twenty centuries elapsed since the city’s foundation. She went in.
The shop, chalky with the light streaming through the delicately unclean windows, revealed a strange sort of indecision. At first, Helen thought the beakers, pipettes, and oddly shaped glassware, along with labeled flasks, bottles, and jars, were part of the great assortment of props that cluttered the room—bicycles and Roman helmets, parasols and stuffed animals, dolls and nautical accoutrements. But gradually she understood the place was stuck somewhere between the realms of science and art. Was this a chemist’s laboratory or painter’s studio? It seemed as if both sides had given up a good while ago, leaving the dispute unresolved.
A small man with kind or exhausted features came out from behind a curtain in the back. He was delighted to find that this foreign young lady spoke Italian so well. After a short conversation, he produced an album with cabinet cards, the old-fashioned kind Helen’s mother used to collect as a child. She recognized many of the objects the legionaries, hunters, and sailors held in the photographs. The man said she should make an imposing Minerva. He unrolled a backdrop of the Parthenon, placed Helen in front of it, and rummaged through the props for a helmet, a spear, and a stuffed owl. Helen declined. But before disappointment set in on the photographer’s face, she said she would very much like to have her picture taken. No costume, though. No backdrop. Just her, standing there, in the shop. The photographer, pleased and confused in equal measure, proceeded to record the first day of Helen’s new life.
HAVING REACHED THEIR FOURTH YEAR on the Continent, the Brevoorts had been to all the capitals and vacation sites frequented by American expatriates, while also tracing what, on the map, looked like a demented trail in their attempt to further Helen’s education. Because they had traveled so widely and for so long, following both their social and academic pursuits, Helen—very much despite her reserved disposition and mostly because of her mother’s indefatigable efforts to promote her family’s triumphs—had turned into a bit of a sensation. Whenever Leopold was away on one of his short trips to visit a salon of particular interest, attend a séance, join a meeting of the Theosophical Society, or see one of the people he called his colleagues, Mrs. Brevoort would bring her daughter to some of her engagements, claiming she was now old enough to start learning how the world truly worked. But according to form, Helen was, of course, too young to be out in society. Mrs. Brevoort, then, brought her along not as another guest but as entertainment.
Prompted by Mrs. Brevoort, men skeptically swirling snifters of brandy and ladies sipping thimblefuls of sherry with bemusement had Helen read passages from two random books, sometimes in different languages, which she would quickly memorize and then repeat verbatim as an after-dinner diversion. The distracted guests found this somewhat charming. But when Mrs. Brevoort, after that initial demonstration, asked her daughter to alternate sentences from each one of them, and then do the same thing starting at the end, smug smiles invariably slackened into gaping awe. This was only the first feat in her routine, which included a variety of mental stunts and always ended in a murmured ovation. Soon, her presence started to be requested. She became somewhat of a “thing.” There was no need for Mrs. Brevoort to tell her daughter to keep these performances, which were doing so much for the family’s renown, a secret from her father.
But there is no such thing as confidential publicity, and in the end, while the family was visiting with the Edgecombs in Paris, Mr. Brevoort was furious to learn that his wife had been using his daughter’s talents as a parlor trick. Over the previous year or two, as their inclinations diverged and their marriage deteriorated in proportion, Catherine and Leopold Brevoort had tried, for the most part, to stay out of each other’s way, hoping to avoid the bickering in which most of their exchanges ended. When the truth about Helen’s performances came to light, however, the anger that had hardened and sedimented in heavy layers of resentment came crashing down in a landslide. Mrs. Brevoort was sick and tired of her husband’s self-absorbed gibberish, his dubious science, and all the celestial nonsense that kept him from addressing his family’s very terrestrial needs. If things had reached the point where they depended on the kindness of increasingly distant friends, whose hospitality they enjoyed thanks to her resourcefulness and her hard work (and Mrs. Brevoort gave this last word its full weight by pointing at her own chest), and if she needed to enlist Helen’s talents to maintain and expand those friendships, it was only because he could not be relied upon to ensure the well-being of his family. Mrs. Brevoort had spoken in a venomous hiss, knowing better than to engage in a shouting match while staying in the Edgecombs’ guest room. But Mr. Brevoort had no such qualms. The gift that God had given his daughter to converse with Him, he screamed, was not to become a sacrilegious circus act. His daughter would not be dragged into the frivolous mud in which his wife so much enjoyed to plod. His daughter would not be subjected to this intellectual harlotry.
Helen looked at her shoes throughout the entire fight. She could not face her father; she did not want to see his mouth forming those senseless words. It would be a confirmation that someone else was now speaking through him. This way, it was just a ranting voice—a disembodied scream, unrelated to her father. More than the threatening tone, what she found terrifying was the incoherence of his tirade, because she thought there was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.
After this row (it would take Mrs. Brevoort an embarrassed conversation with Mrs. Edgecomb the next morning, followed by several weeks devoted to a tactful counter-gossip campaign around Paris, to partially undo that evening’s damage), Helen’s talents continued to flourish, against all odds, under the most rigid surveillance. Although she disliked being subjected to her father’s rigorous and rambling tutelage, she did not find his strictures more oppressive than her mother’s gregariousness.
ONE OF THE FEW TRAITS the Brevoorts had in common, even if for entirely different reasons, was their disdainful lack of curiosity regarding current events. Mrs. Brevoort viewed the irruption of public affairs into her private life as a personal affront. She cared about the administrative, financial, and diplomatic intricacies that kept society going as much as she was concerned about the engine under the hood of a motorcar or the fire room below a steamer’s deck. “Things” should simply “work.” She had no interest in a mechanic explaining to her what the problem was with some greasy piston valve. As for Mr. Brevoort, what could the daily news possibly mean to someone occupied with eternity? Since they both lived on the outskirts of political reality, they did not immediately understand the grave implications of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.
Everyone told them they were lucky to find themselves in Switzerland and advised them not to leave the country until the situation became clearer. As they made their way to Zürich—where they had planned, months earlier, to meet some friends and then go on a summer excursion—they saw the Swiss army being mobilized and heard the borders were being militarized. It was the very height of the season, and there were thousands of Americans scattered around mountain, valley, and lakeside spas—from convalescents spending their savings at hostelries by municipal baths to New York grandees taking the cure at stately hotels. Orme Wilson, for example, found himself in Bern, Chauncey Thorowgood in Geneva, Cardinal Farley in Brunnen, and Cornelius Vanderbilt in St. Moritz. Regardless of rank, however, all the Americans the Brevoorts met along the way were in a state of frenzy. There was talk of war. Total war.
When they first arrived in Zürich, the Brevoorts stayed with the Betterleys, who had just spoken with Mr. Pleasant Stovall, United States Minister to Switzerland. Should they go on with their vacation or go home? Mr. Stovall said that concerns over war were not uncommon in Europe. But every seasoned diplomat was well aware of the disastrous consequences of an open conflagration, and he therefore hoped reason and friendly interventions would manage to avert this major disaster. Within a few weeks, Austria, Serbia, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain had issued formal declarations of war. Soon, the conflict engulfed most of Europe.
During the strange months that followed, the improvised American community in Switzerland was dragged, as a whole, into something that resembled what had been the Brevoorts’ everyday reality for years. There was neither cash nor gold at hand; checks, even those issued by sound American banking houses, were repudiated; letters of credit were refused. Millionaires depended on the goodwill of hoteliers and had to borrow pocket money from them. People brought their own sugar to tea. Everyone received rationing cards, and at dinner parties, the guests, in gowns and white ties, would give theirs to the hosts providing the meal. There was a widespread state of indigent precariousness. And Mrs. Brevoort had never felt so relieved and relaxed in her whole life.
Still, there was the reality of the war encroaching on them—a reality of which the belligerent airplanes grazing the Alps on their way toward the front were a constant reminder. Most shipping lines had had their vessels interned or their sailings canceled. Obtaining a ticket on a small, crowded boat was a luxury that required connections of the highest order. While Mrs. Brevoort was doing all she could to secure safe passage out of Europe for her family, Mr. Brevoort seemed to have taken permanent residence in a remote land ruled by occult conspiracies, mystic hierarchies, and labyrinthine laws. Everyday tasks became unmanageable, and each morning found him more and more disoriented. He spoke, day and night, in a mélange of increasingly imaginary tongues, struggling to understand the rules he had created for himself and getting lost in the antinomies and paradoxes that beset his mind. He became irascible.
