Trust

by

Hernan Diaz

Trust: Book 3, Part 3 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
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.
The fact that no one seems to have examined Mildred’s papers since they were boxed up suggests that, by and large, people are happy to accept the story that Andrew has told about himself and his life, even if it is based on half-truths or outright lies. Since Andrew is also one of the “Great American Men,” including those who founded the U.S., the failure to examine Andrew’s story represents the failure to interrogate the mythos that animates the U.S., including the mythology of “great” and “self-made men.”
Themes
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Gender and Subjugation Theme Icon
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
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.
Ida points out one of the main lies in Andrew’s autobiography, which is the lie of omission of leaving out any account of slavery. By leaving out any mention of slavery, Andrew attempts to cover up facts that would be damning for his family and tell an alternate, falsified version of history that aggrandizes himself and his family. By doing that, Andrew also attempts to make a statement about morality and about what is right and wrong. Implicitly, Andrew’s lie is an argument that he, as someone with an inordinate amount of power, gets to say what is right and wrong.
Themes
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Wealth Theme Icon
Power and Morality Theme Icon
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
Quotes
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.
While Andrew’s discussion of the crash of 1929 mostly relates to his attempts to avoid blame for what happened, Mildred’s actions show that she attempted to mitigate the fallout of the crash among those who lost everything, something about which Andrew has little or no concern. The appearance Harold Vanner’s name on guestlists for small dinner parties suggest that he and Mildred may have been closer that Andrew says.
Themes
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Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
Quotes
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. 
This passage shows again how Andrew’s wealth and power impact everything in their orbit. The man’s threat aimed at Ida’s father is especially telling. The man is trying to get dirt on Andrew, and is presumably no friend of Andrew, suggesting that whatever operation the man represents, his extortion scheme isn’t based on taking Andrew down out of principle.  
Themes
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Wealth Theme Icon
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
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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. 
Andrew illustrates the power that he holds over Ida by virtue of his wealth when he admonishes her for her lack of attention. Directly after that, he launches into another account of how he’s been unjustly vilified, suggesting that his main preoccupations, if not his only focus in life, are his personal grievances.
Themes
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Gender and Subjugation Theme Icon
Wealth Theme Icon
Power and Morality Theme Icon
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
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.
Ida’s discovery that Bonds isn’t in the New York Public Library again demonstrates Andrew’s power. Andrew exercises that power, as he’s previously said, to bend reality to his whims. In addition to distorting reality to try and erase the novel Bonds from existence, Andrew also attempts to use his autobiography to distort reality in similar ways, for example by changing Mildred’s character and omitting any mention of slavery.
Themes
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Gender and Subjugation Theme Icon
Wealth Theme Icon
Power and Morality Theme Icon
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
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.
As a character, Jack continues to be hard to pin down. On the one hand, he generously offers to help clean Ida and her father’s apartment. On the other, he often seems to instigate arguments with Ida, and Ida is so suspicious of him that she suspects he has stolen pages of her manuscript. This passage further elaborates on the idea that Ida’s manuscript is a coming-of-age story. This scene in particular illustrates how the extortionist’s demands, and Ida’s work with Andrew, improbably lead Ida further down the path of becoming a writer. 
Themes
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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.
Part of Andrew’s power consists of the hold he has over Ida’s thoughts and mind. Andrew’s treatment of Mildred makes it clear again that he’s not at all bothered by mixing fiction with fact in his autobiography. It also shows that, while he may have once genuinely loved Mildred, he is willing to erase who she was as a person to burnish his reputation as a “Great Man,” showing that he is ultimately driven by ego and status more than anything else.
Themes
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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.
Despite Ida’s misgivings about Andrew, she still cares deeply about what he thinks. Andrew’s demand that Ida not go into Ida’s room echoes Benjamin’s demand to Helen that she not enter his office. The fact that the nature of the room has changed—from Benjamin’s place of business to Mildred’s room—suggests that perhaps, through Mildred, Andrew learned to care about something other than business. However, Andrew has also shown, over and over again, that at this point he’s willing to sacrifice any humanity he found in his marriage to Mildred to try and achieve the status of a “Great Man.”
Themes
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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.
This passage illustrates again how Andrew’s wealth impacts everything in its orbit. In this case, Jack is so affected by Andrew’s wealth that it drives him to betray Ida. This section also brings Jack’s character into clearer focus. While he was cleaning the apartment or trying to do nice things for Ida, he was simultaneously blackmailing her and trying to extort her. 
Themes
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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.
The explanation of Jack’s scheme also shows the toll that the Great Depression takes on people. The lack of work in journalism contributes to Jack’s desperation, which leads him to attempt to extort Ida. Jack’s treatment of Ida is similar to Andrew’s treatment of Mildred in the autobiography, as both men show that they care much more about themselves than the people they claim to like or love.
Themes
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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.
Ida’s scheme to see Mildred’s room shows how interested Ida is in Mildred. As Ida said before, she sees herself in Helen, the fictional version of Mildred from Bonds. With that in mind, Ida’s willingness to take risks to find the truth about Mildred shows how much she wants to discover the truth behind Andrew’s lies. It also shows the lengths to which she’s willing to go to discover the truth about herself, reinforcing the idea that her memoir is a coming of age story.
Themes
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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. 
Mildred’s room gives Ida more insight into who Mildred was as a person. The image of Mildred she finds is starkly different from the image of Mildred Andrew attempts to portray in his autobiography. That marked difference shows how significantly Andrew has consciously attempted to distort and erase the truth about Mildred’s life for his own gain.   
Themes
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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 reiterates his favorite talking points about how the 1929 crash. Andrew’s preoccupation with the public perception of his role in the crash seems to signal two things. First, he doesn’t have much to say, so he sticks to one topic. Second, he denies blame so vehemently because privately, perhaps he does feel guilty about the role he played in the crash.
Themes
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Self-Interest vs. the Common Good Theme Icon
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.
Andrew illustrates again the power that he holds over Ida, as he presents her with a plan without seeming to give Ida a choice of whether to accept it or not. Andrew’s mention of Ida’s father echoes the scene when the would-be extortionist threatens Ida’s father. The difference here is that Andrew’s threat of Ida’s father is more subtle, and that Andrew has the power to back up his threats, unlike the extortionist.
Themes
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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.
Andrew’s domineering attitude toward Ida seems to be in part a result of his misogyny. In that way, his treatment of Ida is similar to his treatment of Mildred in his autobiography. He expects to be able to subjugate both women so he can get what he wants from them. His treatment of Ida also reinforces the idea that he gains power from his wealth, as he knows that Ida wouldn’t have the resources to stand up to him if she wanted to.  
Themes
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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.
Ida frequently hears her father’s voice in her head reprimanding her for the decisions she makes regarding Andrew. His reaction to Ida’s decision to move, though, strikes a decidedly different tone and shows the love and respect he has for Ida. The difference between Ida’s expectation of her father’s response and her father’s actual reaction suggests that when Ida hears her father’s voice in her head, it may be a manifestation of her own conscience.
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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.
Andrew’s plagiarism of Ida’s story is another example of Andrew’s misogyny. Not only is he willing to take credit for Ida’s work, but he also uses his plagiarism to further subjugate Mildred so that she fits his view of how the wife of a ”Great Man” would act. Before plagiarizing Ida’s story, Andrew had again been recounting his talking points about the 1929 crash. His life is portrayed as utterly empty. Despite his wealth and power, he's a broken record of personal grievances, and he has to resort to plagiarism to find other subjects to talk about.  
Themes
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Quotes
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.
Ida’s feeling that the apartment doesn’t belong to her symbolizes the idea, which she has hinted at throughout the memoir, that her work with Andrew has made her feel like her life doesn’t quite belong to her. As a coming-of-age story, the memoir implicitly asks what Ida must do to regain a sense of ownership over her own life.
Themes
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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. 
The fact that one of the men who worked for Andrew offers Ida a different job soon after Andrew’s death, without any competition for the job, shows how status begets status. By being in proximity to Andrew, Ida has achieved a level of status that means that opportunities will be readily available to her from that point on. The idea that status begets status is similar to the idea, which Andrew resists, that money begets money. He wants to take credit for being a financial genius while his critics argue that with his vast wealth, it would be almost impossible for him not to earn money from investments. 
Themes
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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.
The characterization of Ida’s father as a foil to Andrew reaches its culmination in this section. Andrew dies wealthy but alone and without any close relationships. In contrast, the penny that Ida’s father gives to Ida seems to renew their bond, illustrating that the most valuable things in life—like one’s close relationships—don’t cost much, if anything at all. Ida’s decision to keep that penny also signals the close of her coming-of-age story. While she may not embrace her father’s anarchism, by keeping the penny, she shows that she values family and close relationships over the emptiness of Andrew’s life.
Themes
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