Trust

Helen Rask is the tragic heroine of Bonds whom Vanner models on Mildred Bevel. As a precocious child, she delights in her father Leopold’s tutorship until he begins treating her as an object of study. Her precocity grows to hyperbolic proportions: As an 11-year-old, she is multilingual and has a photographic memory for text. Her mother, Catherine, exploits her abilities as party entertainment, having Helen extemporaneously memorize two long texts in different languages and recite them backward and forward. This hyperbolic description indicates how people, including her parents, treat Helen as more of a thing than a person (39). Helen becomes withdrawn and solitary.

In Helen, Vanner sculpts Mildred into the character of the doomed heroine. Partenza notes that Vanner “force[s] her into the stereotype of fated heroines throughout history, made to offer the spectacle of their own ruin. Put[s] her in her place” (300). A tragic fate strips a character of self-determination: no matter what they do they cannot escape their predetermined demise.

For most of Trust, Mildred appears only as a shadow, mediated through Vanner’s depiction of her as the intelligent but tragic Helen Rask and Bevel’s depiction of her as a weak, childlike homemaker. The reader sees Mildred how Vanner and Bevel would like to see her: a doomed heroine and a supportive, innocuous wife, respectively. Trust revolves around the mystery of Mildred’s true character, a mystery that Vanner and Bevel’s fabrications make conspicuous. The final book, Futures, gives the reader an unmediated window into Mildred’s mind and life as she dies of cancer in a Swiss hospital. She is the polymath Bevel pretends to be, the mastermind behind the investment strategy he gets credit for.

Futures provides only a fragmentary look at Mildred; the events of her life remain mostly off-page and her motives remain shrouded in mystery. The only explanation she gives for masterminding an investment strategy for Bevel over the years resembles Rask’s and Bevel’s single-minded fascination with investment: “I was obsessed with the process; [Bevel] was addicted to the results. But it’d be dishonest to claim it was only an intellectual exercise for me. I discovered a deep well of ambition within. From it I extracted a dark fuel” (386). The language—“deep well” and “dark fuel”—suggests a primordial, amoral drive for profit, for more, that resembles Rask’s exaggerated appetite for profit in Bonds. “Dark fuel” connotes the dirty money of the American oil barons mentioned in Bevel’s autobiography. These fortunes shroud a terrible human cost.

Bevel is the investor on whom Vanner bases Rask. Unlike Rask, Bevel is human: He speaks; he feels; he wants. Through Partenza’s eyes, the reader sees that, despite his professed humility, Bevel is preoccupied with his public image. He fears ridicule and is anxious to appear smart, patriotic, and moral. Unlike with Rask, there are multiple perspectives of Bevel: The reader sees him through his own eyes, through Partenza’s eyes (both in 1938 and 1985), and through Mildred’s eyes. These multiple angles allow the reader to triangulate who he really is, seeing past the image he fabricates in My Life.

Bevel is a superficial man pretending to be profound, someone who takes imitation for the original. Mildred notes that “he mistakes doubt with depth, hesitation with analysis” (379). Bevel imitates Mildred’s behavior, fashioning a facsimile of her personality for himself. This propensity for imitation also manifests in his taste for kitsch: He employs a butler who, Partenza notes, seems “to be impersonating a butler in a film” (256) and loves his vacation home, La Fiesolana, a replica of Tuscan architecture. In a world where fiction and reality intermingle, imitation easily supplants the original. Bevel profits from this fact: Everyone mistakes his impersonation of genius as the real thing.

Ida Partenza is the 23-year-old ghostwriter Bevel hires for his autobiography. Bevel hires her because as a second-generation Italian immigrant she lives outside his set, isolating her from disclosing to anyone Bevel knows the fictions she writes for him. Partenza’s reasons for accepting the job are multiple: Foremost, she needs to support herself and her father. She also enjoys that getting a job on Wall Street provokes her Marxist-anarchist father.

Partenza is the most transparent character in Trust. Though missing from her memoir is an account of Mildred’s true personality, A Memoir, Remembered still offers the most comprehensive narrative in Trust in that in it Partenza weighs Bonds, My Life, and her experiences with Bevel in an honest attempt to uncover the truth about the Bevels’ marriage. Partenza is like the detective of the books she grew up on, discerning order from chaos with her investigation. Her investigative perspective benefits from 50 years of remove from the central events of the narrative, allowing her to reflect in a way absent from the other books of Trust.

Partenza’s unnamed father is an Italian American émigré who lives with his daughter in the Italian enclave of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. He’s an anarchist who earns a meager living as a manual typesetter. His insistence on sticking to manual typesetting after it becomes obsolete shows his obstinate, prideful, and aggrieved personality. Partenza describes him as wallowing in his powerlessness and isolation. He’s a both static and flat character who appears as a tragicomic figure unaware of the hypocrisies that undermine the idealism he prides himself on.