Trust: Book 4 Summary & Analysis

Mildred’s diary is divided into morning, afternoon, and evening entries. In the first entry, a nurse asks if she can touch Mildred and gives Mildred a massage. In the ensuing days, Mildred receives a shipment of books and relishes the practice in the Swiss sanatorium of warming clothes before one puts them on in the morning. She also analyzes the notes and structure of the music of church bells, which she hears coming from a church she can’t see. Andrew calls from Zürich, where he has gone to conduct business. Mildred knows that he’s genuinely concerned for her. 

Mildred is in profound pain, but she doesn’t tell the nurse because she doesn’t want morphine. She reads in the evening, and the next morning, she gets morphine. The sedation of morphine is pleasant, but she isn’t interested in writing about her own “stupor.” Andrew returns from Zürich and looks tired. He presents his questions as statements. Mildred advises him that certain financial positions he’s taken are wrong, and Andrew says he’ll make a phone call in the morning to change those investments. Mildred wonders what her cells would mutate into if they didn’t kill her first. 

Andrew goes to Zürich again, partly to be away from Mildred’s illness, which he hates. Mildred thinks that she made a mistake in telling Andrew about her illness the way she did. She should have steered him, as she has so often done before, into making the right decision while maintaining the belief that he’s in control. Instead, when she found the tumor, she had tests conducted behind his back and then brought him the incontrovertible evidence that there was nothing to be done. And then she insisted they come to this spa in Switzerland. She should have let Andrew help in some way.

Andrew calls from Zürich for advice on a particular question, and Mildred tells him how to approach it. She can hear the gears turn in Andrew’s head as she explains it. Mildred isn’t tired of him so much as she’s sick of the person she becomes when she’s around him. When Andrew returns, he says that he wishes he and Mildred had spent more time at his family’s home in the Hudson Valley. Mildred says that the home is a cathedral of kitsch. It’s an imitation of a Florence villa that is proud of how close it comes to the original. It’s a hallmark of an age in which artifice is the ultimate standard, like a painting of a sunset that one insists is better than the sunset itself. Mildred is ashamed of the vitality she feels when she makes the argument.

Mildred later apologizes to Andrew for what she said. Andrew says he didn’t know what she was talking about and then gives her a bracelet as a gift. The next day, Mildred is surprised and happy to get letters from friends back home. She didn’t tell any of them where she would be, and she’s happy for once that a secret of hers got out. Harold Vanner writes with gossip from New York. And another person writes asking for business advice. Mildred also received a letter from her mother, which will take all of her strength to respond to. 

Mildred eats dinner at the spa’s restaurant. During dinner, several patients perform musical acts, and Mildred grows increasingly frustrated at the lack of talent on stage and at the audience’s fawning response. She gets up to leave and realizes that her response is triggered by painful childhood memories, which she’s never told anyone about in full. When Mildred was 11, her mother forced her to perform difficult math equations in front of party guests, something Mildred hated to do. It went on for a year and stopped when Mildred no longer looked like a child.  

Mildred writes that some diaries are written with the hope that one day they’ll be discovered and read. Others are written with the understanding that no one will ever see the words. Her diary oscillates between those two categories. She continues to go through her daily regimen of procedures and massages. When Andrew comes back from Zürich, he’s happy with how his business dealings have turned out. As usual, he ascribes his success to his “intuition,” and Mildred has to stop herself from snapping at him. 

Andrew arranges for a string quartet to come to play in the spa’s library, and Mildred is touched by the gesture. She’s unimpressed by the quartet’s selections but thinks the musicians themselves are exceptional. The members met in Berlin but left Germany when Hitler came to power. Mildred tells them they can come to her with whatever they need. When the cellist hesitantly says they could benefit from flights to the U.S. and visas, Mildred says they should consider it done. 

A few days later, Andrew calls from Zürich again, looking for financial advice. Mildred is perturbed and doesn’t respond. She is frustrated with Andrew. As usual, she thinks, he mistakes his reservation and uncertainty for insight and evaluation. Andrew says that Mildred lives for this sort of thing but immediately regrets his wording. Mildred responds that that’s exactly the point; she lived for it, and now it’s over. After the phone call, Mildred recalls how her role in Andrew’s finances changed. It started in the early 1920s when Andrew saw that the small amount of money he gave Mildred for the philharmonic performed better than his own investments.

At that time, Mildred showed Andrew her books and her investment methods. She taught him how to see outside of the confines of the market. She and Andrew then started collaborating on investments. When Mildred had access to Andrew’s full funds, the results were almost instantaneous, and Andrew’s reputation grew. Andrew knew he couldn’t sustain his newfound success without Mildred, and Mildred knew she wouldn’t be able to operate in the way she did without him. But soon it became clear that there was a power imbalance. Andrew ran out of things to teach Mildred about the market, while Mildred’s methods continued to be valuable. Mildred thought that imbalance would lead to the end of their marriage, but she later came to think it represented the true beginning of their marriage, which only started once she became more committed to her vows than to Andrew as a person.

From 1922 to 1926, Mildred’s methods, which involve a “cobweb architecture” and “stickiness in math,” caused Andrew’s fortune to grow exponentially. She tried to explain her methods to Andrew, but he couldn’t follow them, which led him to resent her. Mildred devised a method of taking advantage of the lags in the ticker tape processing. She offhandedly said to Andrew that the whole financial system rests on the keyboard operators at the stock exchange. If someone bribed one of those operators to give them information before they typed it, they could make a fortune. Andrew did just that. The scheme lasted a few weeks, and Andrew made an exorbitant amount of money. Mildred found out about it and called him a criminal. The two didn’t speak after that for about two years.

In the sanatorium, Mildred is ill over the next few days. She continues reading books while she feels up to it and asks her nurse to give her a haircut. Andrew travels between Zürich and the sanatorium. After 1926, Mildred and Andrew remained distant from each other, but then Mildred was struck by an overwhelming exhaustion. She stayed in bed, and Andrew would check on her. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. But then, in early 1929, she was diagnosed with cancer. That was around the same time that she realized that the market would crash before the end of the year.

In 1929, Mildred didn’t immediately tell Andrew about her cancer diagnosis, but she started giving him financial advice again. She gave him that advice surreptitiously, so he could think he came up with the ideas on his own. Andrew didn’t believe the market would crash, but Mildred started taking out short positions. She viewed the stock market as a kind of song or orchestral piece. She could listen to the notes and understand what notes would come next. After the crash, Mildred tried to put together a comprehensive recovery plan. Andrew gave small donations in Mildred’s name, but she was ashamed to be associated with those “crumbs.” In the sanatorium, Mildred’s health continues to decline. She hears a hum inside her head and drifts in and out of sleep.