Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

There had been three calls while I was gone.

The third one was from my daughter. In tears.

“Daddy, it’s Joanna,” she sobbed. “Please call me back, please !”

I should explain that I’m divorced and that my former wife has custody of our only child, who is now fourteen years old. That was why Joanna was calling me at the house I was renting instead of being in the house itself, where I could take her in my arms and find out why the hell she was crying. I dialed Susan’s number at once. Susan is my former wife. Susan’s number used to be our number, but not only did she get custody of our daughter, she also got the house and the Mercedes-Benz and $24,000 a year in alimony. Joanna answered the phone.

“What is it?” I said.

“Oh, Daddy, thank God !” she said.

“What’s the matter, Joanna?”

“Mommy wants to send me away,” she said.

“Away? What do you mean, away?”

“To school. In the fall. She wants to send me away to school.”

“What?” I said. “Where? Why?”

“Simms Academy,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“What? Why?”

“She says it’ll be good for me. She says St. Mark’s is getting run-down. She says... you won’t like this, Daddy.”

“Tell me.”

“She says too many black kids are infiltrating the school. That was the word she used. Infil—”

“Put her on the phone.”

“She isn’t here,” Joanna said. “That’s why I called, so I could talk to you in—”

“Where is she?”

“Out to dinner. With Oscar the Bald.”

Oscar the Bald was Oscar Untermeyer, Susan’s most recent flame.

“When will she be back?”

“Late, she said.”

“Tell her to call me the minute she gets in. Whatever time it is, tell her to call me.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Do I really have to go to school in Massachusetts?”

“Over my dead body,” I said.

“I’ll tell her to call you,” Joanna said. “I love you, Dad.”

“Love you, too, honey.”

“I love you lots,” she said, and hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle. The desk clock read six-thirty. I did not feel like entertaining either Terry Belmont or her fried chicken, with or without all the trimmings. I felt like getting into my car and driving to every restaurant in the city of Calusa until I found my goddamn ex-wife and—

I told myself to calm down.

This was just another of Susan’s passing whims. Like the time she’d threatened to put Joanna in a nunnery if she didn’t stop hanging around with “the class slut.” She knew damn well she couldn’t send Joanna away to school. Or could she? She had custody. All I did was pay the bills. I didn’t mind paying the bills. The tuition at St. Mark’s was astronomical, and it couldn’t be any worse at Simms, wherever the hell in Massachusetts that was, but if Joanna was getting a good education, who the hell cared?

Unless a kid was lucky enough to get into Bedloe, Calusa’s exclusive public high school “for the gifted,” or rich enough to afford one of the area’s two private preparatory schools — St. Mark’s in Calusa itself, or the Redding Academy in nearby Manakawa — the secondary-school educational choices were limited to three schools, and the selection was further limited by that part of the city in which the student happened to live. It would be nice to report that white parents in Calusa dance joyously in the streets when faced with the possibility of their children attending Arthur Cozlitt High, which has an unusually high percentage of black students. This, alas, is not the case. I have had at least a dozen irate parents trotting into my office in the past several years, asking if there was not some sort of legal action they might take to effect a transfer from Cozlitt to either Jefferson or Tate, each with a more normally balanced ratio of black to white students.

Calusa is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, a third of them black, a tiny smattering of them Cubans who have drifted over to the West Coast from Miami. There used to be a restaurant called Cuban Mike’s on Main Street, and it made the best sandwiches in town, but it closed last August when someone firebombed the place. The whites blamed the blacks; the blacks blamed the rednecks; and the handful of Cubans in town kept their mouths shut lest fiery crosses appear on their lawns one dark night. One of these days Calusa is going to have a racial conflagration that will blow the town sky-high; it is long overdue. In the meantime everyone here pretends that this is still the year 1844; I think my partner Frank and I may be the only people in all of Calusa who notice that at any performance given at the Helen Gottlieb, only half a dozen people in the audience will be black — in an auditorium that seats two thousand.

The phone rang again.

“Hello?” I said.

“Daddy?”

Joanna again.

“What Mom said, actually — about the infiltration — what she said was ‘niggers.’ Two black kids’ve been admitted to the school.”

“Terrific,” I said. My former wife from Chicago, Illinois, was turning into a Florida redneck. “You tell her to call me the minute she gets in that house.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“And don’t you worry,” I said.

“I won’t, Daddy.”

“Love you, honey.”

“Me, too,” she said, and hung up.

My partner Frank says that women know how to manipulate me.

I went out into the living room, turned on the light against the encroaching dusk, mixed myself a very strong, very dry martini, and then carried it back into the bathroom with me. I took two long swallows before I got into the shower, and drained the glass the minute I turned off the water. I was mixing myself another martini, a wet towel around my waist, when the front doorbell rang. I looked across the kitchen counter at the clock on the wall. A few minutes after seven. Terry Belmont.

“Just a second,” I said.

I went to the door and opened it.

“Oh my,” Terry said.

“I just got out of the shower,” I said. “I’ll get dressed, the bar’s—”

“don’t go to any trouble on my part,” she said.

“won’t take me a minute,” I said. “The bar’s right there, help yourself.”

“Where can I put this stuff?” she asked.

Her arms were laden with brown paper bags.

“Kitchen’s over there,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“ I showered, too,” she said, and smiled.

I went into the bedroom, put on clean underwear, white ducks, a blue shirt I’d had tailor-made in Mexico for three dollars, and a pair of loafers. I went into the bathroom, combed my hair, and looked at myself in the mirror again. I still wasn’t a movie star. Terry was standing at the bar when I came back into the living room.

“What’s Stolichnaya?” she asked.

“Vodka,” I said. “Russian vodka.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “it says so right here on the bottle.”

“Would you like some?”

“No, I don’t like vodka.”

“Well, what can I get you?”

“What are you drinking?”

“A martini.”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” she said.

I started mixing the martini.

“Yell when You’re hungry,” she said. “All I have to do is heat it up.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want an olive in this or an onion?”

“What are you having?”

“A twist.”

“I’ll have a twist, too,” she said.

I cut a narrow slice of lemon peel, rubbed it around the rim of the glass, and dropped it in. I handed the glass to her.