Trust

Chapter 2 returns to the day in 1938 when Partenza responded to the call for a secretary at Bevel’s offices in downtown Manhattan. Partenza is 23 and lives with her father in a railroad apartment in Carroll Gardens, an Italian enclave. Her father’s meager living as a printer leaves Partenza responsible for rescuing them from debt. She teaches herself typing, stenography, and bookkeeping and, after a series of other applications, applies for the job with Bevel. Outside his offices the line of candidates stretches around the block.

Partenza’s father is an Italian émigré and single father. Partenza is close with him growing up: Together, they create a weekly local newspaper and bond over her mocking performances of the poems of Italian poet and anarchist Arturo Giovannitti. Later in her life, Partenza realizes that in encouraging her to mock Giovannitti, her father was actually asking her to mock him. To him, Giovannitti embodies the life not lived. Both men come from the same place in Italy, are roughly the same age, and are anarchists. After suffering persecution for his workers’ rights activism in America, Giovannitti becomes a national figure. In contrast, Partenza’s father is isolated in his luddite loyalty to the dying art of manual typesetting and in the insular enclave of Carroll Gardens; he’s a man without power who can only talk about change.

After her mother dies when Partenza is seven, she realizes she will have to support her father as her mother did. Partenza holds a series of jobs through her adolescence and teenage years to supplement her father’s meager living. Her father demeans her pursuit of secretarial work on ostensibly political grounds, arguing that “[i]t promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men” (210).

After a long wait, Partenza is finally admitted to Bevel’s offices, where, fearing anti-Italian discrimination, she gives the name Ida Prentice. On the fifteenth floor of the skyscraper, from which the city appears quiet and ordered, Partenza and the other candidates take a series of rigorous tests.

Partenza’s father insists that he is an exile, not an immigrant: He came to America not for greater opportunity but to escape political persecution. He’s a man without a country who feels alienated both by the industrious and materialistic spirit of America and the authoritarianism sweeping Italy. A Marxist, he teaches Partenza that money is the king of commodities because it can be used to purchase anything. As such, it has an imaginary, fictional nature: It is at once everything and nothing. He detests finance capital for spreading social injustice, deriding it as gambling on future value—“the fiction of a fiction” (216). The locus of this fiction is the financial district of Manhattan: “‘[T]hat,’ his upturned palm drew an arc encompassing downtown Manhattan, ‘is [money’s] holy city’” (219).

Partenza’s father brooks no dissent, taking any disagreement with his beliefs as a personal attack. As a teenager, Partenza delights in provoking him by questioning his dogmas. This impulse to provoke factors into her decision to apply for the job at Bevel’s offices on Wall Street: She hopes doing so will force her father to acknowledge their desperate need for money. When she returns home with the news that she’s made it to a personal interview, her father greets her with silence. She washes the dishes he’s left in the sink.

For the second-round assessment, Partenza is asked to write a brief autobiography. This test surprises her. She mixes fact and fiction into a mold of what she thinks is expected for the position: She lies that she’s Episcopal, that her father is a sales clerk, and that she wants to be a housewife; she includes her real love for literature and the death of her mother. Partenza risks writing mainly about her ambitions, explaining that most of her life is ahead of her and that it’s “up to each one of us to carve our present out of the shapeless block of the future” (222). She’s taken to a higher floor to interview with Mr. Shakespear (sic).

Before he interviews Partenza, Mr. Shakespear rejects the candidate ahead of her, a young woman from a prominent family. Mr. Shakespear’s austere art deco office with its dizzying view of the city makes Partenza feel like an alien in her hometown. Mr. Shakespear asks why she wants the job. She replies that money rules everything and that Bevel’s offices are the seat of that power:

‘Why work at a place that makes one thing when I could work at a company that makes all things? Because that’s what money is: all things […] It’s the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities. And if money is the god among commodities, this,’ with my upturned palm I drew an arc that encompassed the office and suggested the building beyond it, ‘is its high temple’ (226).

Her response secures her a final interview with Bevel. 

Partenza has few memories of her mother, but what she does remember is happy. Following her death, Partenza becomes responsible for cleaning up after her father’s work and keeping house. This role seems natural to Partenza, and to her father: “My father, the anarchist, found the fact that child labor was required to keep the gender status quo intact equally natural” (230).

Partenza finds solace from grief in detective fiction written by women. She likes that the stories are a process of discerning order in chaos. She also likes that these female authors control fictional worlds that aren’t just about domesticity and romance but about violence and danger. These women are better served in their work by subverting expectations—thus making their stories surprising—than by obeying some set of rules, which would make them dull. Partenza captivates her father with her retellings of these novels over dinner so much that his food often goes cold.

In Bevel’s office on the top floor of his 70-story skyscraper, the vertigo Partenza felt in Mr. Shakespear’s office returns. Guessing that Bevel is tired of obsequious subordinates, Partenza boldly starts the conversation by commenting that the neighboring skyscraper under construction will soon block Bevel’s view. Bevel informs her that he owns that building, too. Throughout their meeting, Bevel’s face remains expressionless.

Bevel knows that Partenza lied about her background but tells her he doesn’t care. He’s looking for a woman to ghostwrite his autobiography, with which he wants to counter the thinly veiled story of him and his wife in Bonds. Bevel claims to be accustomed to the rumor mill and is wary of engaging with it, explaining that “[d]enial is always a form of confirmation” (238); however, he detests listening to the rumors about his wife that the novel has spread within his set. He wants his autobiography to emphasize that he is more successful than ever and downplay Mildred’s mental health conditions to portray her gentle, domestic soul. Bevel hires Partenza, instructing her to read Vanner’s novel and report to him in a week.

When Partenza returns from her interview she finds her boyfriend, Jack, an aspiring journalist, having lunch with her father. Partenza likes the idea of Jack more than Jack himself. Partenza’s father doesn’t congratulate her on her job and leaves. Jack congratulates her and shares that two newspapers may be interested in his articles. Partenza suggests they celebrate at a nice restaurant with her first paycheck. This suggestion annoys Jack, and he leaves. 

Partenza suspects that buried amid the facts and half-truths in Bonds is a raw secret that enraged Bevel. In her reading, she notes that Bevel is more outspoken than Rask, but otherwise man and character are alike. In Partenza’s future sessions with Bevel, he confirms the fidelity between Rask’s financial maneuvers and his own. Newspapers from the time also confirm the similarities; in fact, Partenza notices that in some cases both Vanner and Bevel repeat almost verbatim passages from these articles.

Partenza identifies with Helen: Like Partenza, Helen is a young, lonely woman who has a domineering father obsessed with harebrained dogmas. Vanner seems to understand Helen and by extension Partenza. Nevertheless, Vanner’s decision to afflict and destroy Helen as he does angers Partenza: Given that Mildred’s mental health didn’t deteriorate, she wonders why Vanner cursed her fictional counterpart with that fate.