Ed McBain: The House That Jack Built

She snapped the cylinder back into the gun.

And put the gun into her shoulder bag.

And looked at the clock on the wall.

Twenty minutes to twelve.

She took a deep breath and went out to her automobile.

The women were explaining it all to Matthew and Bloom.

Trying to explain it all.

“After the call from Hurley,” Sophie said, “I realized we were in trouble again. Abbott’s visit to the house hadn’t posed a serious threat. In fact, after his… accident, I didn’t expect to hear further from him.”

“But then Helen showed up,” Elise said.

“Yes. Helen.”

The two women looked at each other.

“I must admit…” Sophie said, and shook her head, and sighed.

“Yes,” Elise said, and sighed, too.

“The resemblance,” Sophie said.

“Yes.”

“Your hair, your eyes.”

“But blue.”

“But your eyes exactly.”

Both women sighed.

“We almost…”

“But you see, gentlemen…”

“If what we’d done back then was to have any meaning…”

“Protecting the name…”

“Making certain the name wouldn’t be tainted…”

Sophie sighed again. “Giving away a… a granddaughter was… was not very easy,” she said.

“A daughter,” Elise said.

The word seemed to echo in the vaulting room.

“But, you see,” Sophie said, “I knew that if my husband had learned of this… if we had not kept it from Franz, why… he would have killed them both. First that sniveling dog, Charles, and then Elise. Yes. I believe he would have killed his own daughter. For dishonoring the house.”

“For bringing shame to the Brechtmann name.”

“A name that stood for quality and wholesomeness.”

Both women fell silent.

In that room, with the mist from the ocean crowding the French doors like a multitude of silent ghosts from the past, they seemed now to be wondering about the wisdom of what they’d done almost two decades ago — and what they’d been forced to do now, in order to protect that long-ago decision.

“We had to get them out of our lives,” Sophie said. “Abbott and the baby both. To protect Elise… to protect the house…”

“The house?” Matthew said.

“Brechtmann Brewing,” Sophie said.

Matthew nodded.

Sophie sighed again.

“And yet,” she said, “when she returned, a grown woman, pregnant… oh, dear God, pregnant the way my daughter was pregnant so long ago…”

“Mother, please…”

“… oh, dear God, calling me Grandma…”

Sophie covered her face with her hands.

“But you see,” Elise said.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Sophie said, as though her daughter were explaining it to her and not to Matthew and Bloom.

“If what we’d done then was to have any meaning now…”

“Yes,” Sophie said, exhaling the word.

“If protecting the house had been important back then…”

“It was even more important now.”

“How could we acknowledge her?”

“A bastard child?”

Sophie shook her head.

“I asked her to leave. I told her she had no mother here, no grandmother, either. I told her never to come here again. She said she had proof. I knew there was no proof. I sent her on her way.”

The clock on the mantel was ticking.

Above the mantel, Jacob Brechtmann glared down from his portrait.

“And then Hurley called,” Elise said.

“And told us he knew all about the pictures.”

“Which is why I went to see Jonathan…”

Jonathan…

Jonathan…

It is not yet dawn on the morning of January thirtieth…

Elise does not yet know how she will handle this confrontation; it has been so many years, too many years. She is dressed for the rain: black slacks and black jersey top, a black raincoat and a black slouch hat that makes her look like Garbo. And because there is a chill accompanying the rain, she is also wearing black leather gloves.

She parks her car at Pelican Reef and begins walking up the beach toward his house. As she walks, she rehearses what she will say to him. She does not like having to go to him this way, begging a favor of him, especially after the way he treated her the last time, when all she was trying to do was protect him.

Because…

Because back then, even though Jonathan was what he was, there were still times when she succumbed to the dream of what might have been. If only. If only he weren’t homosexual — but he was. If only he hadn’t told her their relationship was hopeless — but he had. And then the self-pity: If only I’d never met him, if only I’d never gone to bed with him…

The rain encourages memories.

The whispering rush of the ocean against the shore prompts total recall.

Time has no meaning in the movie of her mind. When she can flip the switch either to fast forward or reverse, what possible meaning can time have? Choose any scene, choose any snippet, edit them in order or in reckless disarray. Seize each memory but only for a moment; most of the memories are painful. For Elise, time is meaningless except as it defines pain.

The movie is titled My Life with Jonathan .

A cheap little film.

Fade in on a luxurious Florida beach house.

Title over: NOVEMBER, 1968.

It is a gloriously balmy night. Japanese lanterns on the terrace, a band playing Beatles tunes. Elise is sixteen years old and attending the birthday party of her friend Marcia Nathanson, who has just turned seventeen.

The boy who comes walking out onto the terrace is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. Long blond hair and flashing blue eyes. A dancer’s body, a dancer’s moves. Barefooted. Wearing blue jeans and a white sweatshirt. The other boys at the party are wearing ties and jackets; Jonathan Parrish has dropped in from another planet.

Self-absorbed at sixteen, the curse of adolescence, Elise immediately thinks of him as an adjunct to herself, the perfect partner, the ideal mate, blond and blonde, pale and paler, together they will dazzle ! She will capture this gorgeous alien male and keep him in a cage. She will tame this wild and splendid starman and make him her own. Confident of her own good looks, emboldened by her budding sexuality, she fastens herself like a succubus to this twenty-year-old stranger w ho has come not from another galaxy, as it turns out, but only from Indiana.

By the end of the night, she is lying in his arms on the beach.

He insists that she use only her mouth.

But she suspects nothing.

Two weeks later, in the house he is renting on Fatback Key, she persuades him to enter her, and surrenders her virginity to him.

Still suspecting nothing.

In the night, she whispers, “I love you.”

And does not for a moment realize how these words trouble him.

My Life with Jonathan

A film by Elise Brechtmann

Starring, in order of appearance:

*ELISE BRECHTMANN*

*JONATHAN PARRISH*

And, in the role of Charles Abbott:

*CHARLES ABBOTT*

She goes to Abbott for the first time late in December. Deliberately seeks him out in his room over the garage. Goes to him in anger and in tears. Goes to him to get even. Because not an hour earlier, Jonathan Parrish has told her he is homosexual, he is gay, he is as queer as a turnip, he want nothing further to do with her. This entire episode with her — he calls it an episode , he calls what they shared together an episode — this entire episode was merely an experiment, something he still owed himself, something he still had to prove to himself. Prove? But prove what? Why, that girls… women… females cannot satisfy him.

So she is here in this room over the garage…