Trust

In the mid-1980s, the librarian at the Bevels’ house brings Ida three boxes filled with Mildred’s papers. When Ida opens a box, she thinks that no one has examined its contents since the lid was shut, who knows how many years ago. As the librarian warned, Mildred’s handwriting is nearly indecipherable, but Ida gradually learns how to read it. Mildred’s notebooks begin the year she marries Andrew. There’s no evidence of her life in Europe. The notebooks begin sparsely, but by early 1921, Mildred has become involved in music and advocates for boundary-pushing composers, an image at odds with Andrew’s depiction of her as an enthusiastic but naïve dilettante. Ida is ashamed of the role she played in helping Andrew create that image.

In those notebooks, Ida also finds Mildred’s annotations of news items, which gives her a different image of Mildred from the one that either Andrew or Harold Vanner depicted. She begins to suspect that the true Mildred might be in those differences. After going through Mildred’s first box, Ida requests to see Andrew’s papers from 1938, when she worked for him. She finds drafts of his autobiography with his annotations. One passage about Andrew’s great-grandfather, William, sticks out to her. The passage describes how William took out loans to buy cotton at a cheap price to sell in Europe after an embargo was lifted. Ida notices that there’s no mention of slavery and can hear her father’s voice in her head saying that the U.S. and modern-day wealth is built on the original sin of slavery. Ida finds no mention of slavery in Andrew’s papers.

In a box of correspondences, Ida finds nothing but letters addressed to Mildred. Most of them thank Mildred for her donations. In 1929, Mildred’s philanthropy seems to shift. She becomes focused on supporting those who lost everything during the crash, including the owners of stores, factories, and farms. Elsewhere in the Mildred’s notebooks, Ida finds pages torn out and formulas she can’t read. She also sees Harold Vanner’s name on the guestlists for three distinct small dinner parties.

In 1938, a man waits for Ida outside of her apartment. He says they should go inside, since Andrew’s men wouldn’t like it if they were seen together. Ida says her boyfriend and father are upstairs, and if he comes any closer, she’ll scream. The man says that he knows Ida is Andrew’s secretary and that she is writing down his life story. He says he wants a copy of everything she writes. Ida asks who he is, and he warns her that if she doesn’t comply, he’ll tell the FBI about her father’s communist agitating, which might lead to his deportation. He tells Ida to meet him the next day at a soda fountain with the pages he wants. 

Ida thinks her best option is to tell Andrew what happened, that an unknown man threatened her to try and get information. She carries on this internal debate about how to handle the situation and wonders who the man might be. Andrew notices that her attention is flagging and reprimands her. Ida apologizes and says it won’t happen again. Andrew then continues to talk about the role he played in the bull market of the 1920s and how he was unjustly painted as a villain in the crash of 1929. 

Ida decides to write a fictional account for the man who is extorting her. Research she does for the fiction finds its way into Andrew’s autobiography while passages she initially writes for the autobiography end up in the fiction. To make the fiction seem more authentic, she goes to the New York Public Library to do research. She reads newspaper stories covering Andrew’s major transactions and reads novels that touch on Mildred and Andrew’s social scene. At the library, she looks for Bonds but doesn’t find any work by Harold Vanner. She thinks that Andrew, one of the library’s largest donors, must have bent reality to his whims by removing Vanner from the library’s collection.

As Ida diligently works, the apartment she shares with her father becomes messier and messier. Jack comes over and the two discuss the argument they had the last time they met. Ida gestures toward the apartment and asks Jack if it looks like she has time for his needs. Jack surprises Ida when he responds by beginning to clean the apartment for her. Ida kisses him and goes back to work. He asks if she’ll type up an article he’s written for him, and she says of course. She goes for a quick walk and thinks of edits she has to make to the fictional narrative she’s writing for the extortionist. In particular, she wants to add back in a passage she previously discarded. When she gets back to the apartment, though, she finds that all of the pages she had thrown away are missing, and she thinks that Jack took them.

Ida is displeased with herself to find that Andrew’s potential wrath over the stolen pages bothers her more than the fact that someone close to her betrayed her. She thinks again that Andrew’s fortune has warped and distorted everything in its proximity. The next time she sees Andrew, she tries to gauge where she stands with him. He says that Ida has done especially well in her descriptions of Mildred’s private life and suggests that she invent a fictional pastime for Mildred to humanize her. Perhaps Ida could describe Mildred putting together floral arrangements, he says. Ida is taken aback but tries not to show her surprise to Andrew.

Ida suggests a tour of the house, and she is pleased when Andrew says, with some hesitation, that it’s a good idea. She has noticed that Andrew’s approval of her seems to stem from moments when she gently challenges his authority. Because he so often gets his way, he likes it when someone rises to meet him. On the tour, Andrew stops Ida from opening the door to see Mildred’s room. He says he wants to keep some things for himself. Ida seizes an opportunity to ask if he confronts all rumors about him and Mildred as forcefully as those in Bonds. He says of course not; he wanted to confront Harold Vanner because of the scope of Bonds and the particular lies in that book. He also says that Ida has been doing a good job in her work so far, and Ida feels immense relief.

Ida goes to the soda fountain to meet the man who’s extorting her. She gets there early, but the man is already there, eating a sundae at a corner table. Seeing the man eating ice cream, it dawns on Ida that he’s not a powerful representative of a shadowy organization. Instead, he’s just a kid from Brooklyn. And she thinks she knows who sent him. She tells the man she’ll give him $10 if he says who he’s working for. He says he won’t do it. Ida walks away, and the man says, “Jack.” Ida seethes with rage.

The man explains that Jack followed Ida one day because he doesn’t like the idea of her being alone with the man she works for. When he followed her, Jack saw that Ida had gone into Andrew’s mansion. He read some pages that Ida wrote and figured out that Ida was writing an autobiography for Andrew. He decided to try and get those pages from Ida and sell them to a newspaper, which he hoped would land him a job. Ida tells the man to tell Jack that Andrew knows what Jack is up to, and Andrew will unleash his full fury on Jack if Jack doesn’t leave town.

When Ida returns to Andrew’s house, she sees Miss Clifford, the housekeeper, who is supposed to show Ida the greenhouse for sections of the autobiography about Mildred’s love of flowers. Ida tells Miss Clifford that Andrew wanted her to see Mildred’s room first. Miss Clifford is hesitant but eventually takes Ida to Mildred’s room. While they walk there, Ida asks Miss Clifford if she could put her (Ida) in touch with anyone who knew Mildred. Miss Clifford says that everyone on the staff was hired after Mildred died.

Mildred’s room is nothing like what Andrew described. It’s full of avant-garde furniture and sculptures with clean curves and angular shapes. Miss Clifford gets called to attend to something else, and Ida investigates further. The bookcase is full of heavily annotated books in English, Italian, German, and French, many of which are inscribed by their authors. Ida wanders around the room searching for more signs of who Mildred had been. Ida then grabs a piece of blotting paper from a desk just before Miss Clifford returns. 

A man delivers a letter to Ida from Andrew, asking her to meet at dinner since he won’t have time to meet at their usual time that day. A limo arrives at night to take Ida to Andrew’s house. At dinner, Andrew says that the amount of money lost during the 1929 crash could go to the moon and back 10 times. Ida feels embarrassed for Andrew and the inane calculations he has apparently made. He continues to disavow any responsibility for the crash and instead blames it on small-time speculators who used the market to gamble.

Andrew then says that only people like Ida’s father, with his revolutionary zeal and purity, are actually free from responsibility for the crash. Andrew has never brought up Ida’s father before, and Ida suspects that Andrew has been spying on her since she started to work for him. Ida responds by denigrating her father and is ashamed that she’s done that to appease Andrew. Andrew says they can’t go on working as they have been and that he’s rented a furnished apartment for Ida, so they can work outside of business hours. She should move in by the end of the week, he says.

When Ida returns home, she finds her father flustered. Jack has just been by to grab some papers before departing for a new job in Chicago. Her father asks if Ida knows about the job, and Ida lies and says yes. Nothing is missing from her room except the article that Jack wanted her to type up for him. She thinks of how she’ll tell her father that she’s moving out. She’s angry that Andrew didn’t ask her about it; instead, he rented the apartment and told her what to do. And she knows it’s not a coincidence that he brought up her father and his politics in that conversation too. It seems like an implicit threat.

Ida thinks that when she tells her father she’s moving, it will result in a fight, and he’ll accuse her of betraying him and being brainwashed by her employer and Wall Street. When Ida does tell him, though, he says that he trusts her judgment, even if he might not always agree with her. The two hug, and Ida begins to pack. While packing, she goes through some of her father’s things and finds pamphlets that he used to make for her as a child. And then, in one of her father’s drawers, she sees the missing pages she wrote that she thought Jack had taken.

Neither Andrew nor Ida knows that this night will end up being their final meeting. To Ida, the dinner seems the same as the others. She’s seen Andrew a handful of times in the new apartment, always at night. On this night, he talks again about the unfair judgment cast on him as a result of his actions during the 1929 crash. He also plagiarizes Ida when he tells a story of listening to Mildred recount the plots of mystery novels over dinner. Andrew says that when Mildred finished detailing the plots, he would guess the culprit. But Ida recognizes the story as her own. It’s something that she did as a child; she would check out mystery novels from the library and recount the plots to her father. She had used that memory to write a scene for one of Mildred’s invented pastimes for Andrew’s autobiography.

Ida is shocked that Andrew is plagiarizing her memories. She doesn’t know if his vanity has caused him to forget that Ida invented the scene for Mildred or if he thinks that Ida somehow won’t remember writing it. She is familiar with similar instances of gaslighting, but this one is especially outrageous. After Andrew leaves, Ida spends the next week typing up her notes and working on the autobiography, as she usually does. She still feels like the apartment doesn’t belong to her and often wakes up not knowing where she is.

Five days after Ida sees Andrew for the last time, she walks by a storefront and sees a knife that reminds her, for some reason, of her father. In the store, the owner tells her that the knife is from Calabria, and Ida’s “Italian instinct” must have drawn her to it. She buys it as a gift for her father. As she leaves the store, she sees the headline in a newspaper: “ANDREW BEVEL, NEW YORK FINANCIER, DEAD OF HEART ATTACK.” She rushes toward Andrew’s house, wanting to confirm the news for herself, but the house is thronged by reporters, and she knows there’s no point in actually trying to go in. After Andrew’s death, one of the men who initially interviewed Ida for her position as Andrew’s secretary offers her another job, and she continues to live in the apartment Andrew rented for her. 

Ida goes home a few days later to see her father. She wonders if he’ll mention Andrew’s death, something he would never usually bring up. If he mentioned it, that would be tantamount to an admission of guilt on his part that he stole Ida’s papers. But he doesn’t mention Andrew, either during that visit or any time after. Ida gives her father the knife, and her father says it’s bad luck to receive a knife as a gift. If he takes it, then the ties between him and Ida will be cut. But, he says, if he buys it, there won’t be any issues. He offers her a penny for it, and, once he buys it, exclaims what a wonderful knife it is. Ida then keeps the penny that saves their relationship.