Trust by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online Page B

silence.
    "Christ, what a creamy tone," remarked my companion.
    Je rial pas beaucoup de temps,
the voice warned.
    "I can't understand a word."
    Quel dommage!
simpered the voice.
Voyez-vous la maison du coin? Celle avec une lanterne rouge?
    "What the hell," said the girl, and stood up impatiently.
    Donnez-m'en un peu,
the voice pleaded with mannerly piety.
Encore un peu,
it repeated prayerfully,
encore un peu,
it intoned,
encore un peu...
    There was a noise, half rubbing, half knocking, on the other side of the door.
    "Stefanie! Come on—open up, my hands are full."
    "Oh, give it a kick," advised Stefanie; "the needle's stuck."
    I swung the door wide and came face to face with William's son.
    He set down the two plates of sandwiches he had been carrying and Stefanie introduced us. After the first confusion she discovered our surnames were the same.
    "Say!" she ejaculated. "Are you cousins?"
    "Us two?" I said. "No."
    "You could be, you know," she pointed out, "several times removed."
    "It's a long story," began William's son.
    "It's a short story," I interrupted. "We're almost the same age, you see, and when we were four years old we were betrothed. It was agreed upon between our parents—the dowry was settled and everything. At five we were married. Now all we have to do before we can live together permanently is wait."
    Encore un peu,
the electronic voice of Jesus Christ kept insisting.
    "I don't get it," said Stefanie, putting her knuckle against her incisors. "Wait for what?"
    Somehow I no longer envied her comely little feet or her quick eyes the color of tea. "For puberty," I told her.

6
    It was, I suppose, a kind of reunion, although we did not meet as old friends, and scarcely as comrades-in-arms whom an occasion has brought together. We had nothing between us, William's son and I, except the one cramped and tedious social meal, dominated by my mother's inconsequential monologue, of at least half a dozen years before. And whereas William's son at seventeen had resembled nothing so much as a young dog of honorable pedigree, he now had all the characteristics of a larger and somehow more humorous, more democratic animal—a horse, perhaps, or the buffalo as it used to appear on the nickel, neither grazing nor butting: nonetheless a figure of action. I immediately noted the loss of two of his former distinctions. He had given up his odd little calculated stutter and he had dropped the habit of clutching an important book for ballast. For both he now substituted a more profane and impressive mannerism: he smoked cigars, not ordinary cigars, but a narrow, tubular, tightly-rolled dark-leafed variety, which imparted to his fingers a bronze stain of incomparable elegance. He was still very polite, to be sure, but a little cynically, I thought, although it might merely have been the shock—it was a shock—of his maturity. He had, as they say, developed. I had seen him briefly at the end of his boyhood; now he was at the high moment of young manhood. He was, as they say, riding the crest. The curious thing about this zealousness was that it could not have been predicted—at least not in the boy who had spooned up his soup with such ponderous forethought, like a pharmacist meting out a potion or a priest overseeing some libational rite, that day at my mother's table. He had developed, but not in a straight line. It was as though he had begun to form himself, and he had left himself unfinished—long ago he had abandoned himself for another idea. It occurred to me that I had been outwitted. I felt not so much deceived as maliciously but comically hoaxed. He had not even turned out handsome: his head, which then had seemed a bit undersized, but splendidly polished and poised and potent, now looked to be altogether too large for the rest of him, which was encased in black rough cloth. Even his haircut had a vaguely shaggy air, so that he emerged, withal, a wonderful bison. That intellectuality which I had so much admired in my