Stephen King - The Stand

Her father said: “I don’t want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn’t he… or you… being careful?”

“I had birth control pills,” she said. “They didn’t work.”

“Then I can’t put any blame, unless it’s on both of you,” he said, looking at her closely. “And I can’t do that, Frannie. I can’t lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won’t talk about blame.”

She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.

“Your mother will have plenty to say about blame,” he said, “and I won’t stop her, but I won’t be with her. Do you understand that?”

She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen the latter—but on his own terms.

She asked quietly: “Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?”

“You asking me to take your part?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“With Mom?”

“No. With you, Frannie.”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that’s what they say, anyway.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I think I’ve fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in.”

“The baby?” His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden’s hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.

“No, the baby isn’t the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jesse is…” She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jesse, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her, the rush to decide and get out from under the threatening shadow of her mother, who was now at a shopping mall buying gloves for the wedding of Fran’s childhood friend. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother’s favorite sayings.

“He’s weak,” she said. “I can’t explain better than that.”

“You don’t really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?”

“No,” she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn’t trust Jesse, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts. “Jesse means well. He wants to do the right thing; he really does. But… we went to a poetry reading two semesters ago. It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly… very carefully… so as not to miss a word. And me… you know me…”

He put a comfortable arm around her and said, “Frannie got the giggles.”

“Yeah. That’s right. I guess you know me pretty well.”

“I know a little,” he said.

“They—the giggles, I mean—just came out of nowhere. I kept thinking, ‘The scruffy man, the scruffy man, we all came to listen to the scruffy man.’ It had a beat, like a song you might hear on the radio. And I got the giggles. I didn’t mean to. It really didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Enslin’s poetry; it was pretty good, or even with the way he looked. It was the way they were looking at him .”

She glanced at her father to see how he was taking this. He simply nodded for her to go on.

“Anyway, I had to get out of there. I mean I really had to. And Jesse was furious with me. I’m sure he had a right to be mad… it was a childish thing to do, a childish way to feel , I’m sure… but that’s the way I often am. Not always. I can get a job done—”

“Yes, you can.”

“But sometimes—”

“Sometimes King Laugh knocks and you’re one of those people who can’t keep him out,” Peter said.

“I guess I must be. Anyway, Jess isn’t one of those people. And if we were married… he’d keep coming home to that unwanted guest that I had let in. Not every day, but often enough to make him mad. Then I’d try, and… and I guess…”

“I guess you’d be unhappy,” Peter said, hugging her tighter against his side.

“I guess I would,” she said.

“Don’t let your mother change your mind, then.”

She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.

“What do you think of me getting an abortion?” she asked after a while.

“My guess is that’s really what you wanted to talk about.”

She looked at him, startled.

He looked back, half-quizzical, half-smiling, one bushy eyebrow—the left—cocked. Yet the overall impression she took from him was one of great gravity.

“Maybe that’s true,” she said slowly.

“Listen,” he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.

“Frannie, you’ve no business having such an old man for a father, but I can’t help it. I never married until 1956.”

He looked at her thoughtfully in the dusklight.

“Carla was different in those days. She was… oh, hellfire, she was young herself, for one thing. She didn’t change until your brother Freddy died. Until then, she was young. She stopped growing after Freddy died. That… you mustn’t think I’m talking against your mother, Frannie, even if it sounds a little like I am. But it seems to me that Carla stopped… growing… after Freddy died. She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick-dry cement on her way of looking at things and called it good. Now she’s like a guard in a museum, and if she sees anyone tampering with the ideas on display there, she gives them a lot of look-out-below. But she wasn’t always like that. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but she wasn’t.”

“What was she like, Daddy?”

“Why…” He looked vaguely out across the garden. “She was a lot like you, Frannie. She got the giggles. We used to go down to Boston to see the Red Sox play and during the seventh-inning stretch she’d go out with me to the concession and have a beer.”

“Mamma… drank beer?”

“Yes, she did. And she’d spend most of the ninth in the ladies’ and come out cussing me for making her miss the best part of the game when all the time it was she tellin me to go on down to the concession stand and get em.”

Frannie tried to imagine her mother with a cup of Narragansett beer in one hand, looking up at her father and laughing, like a girl on a date. She simply couldn’t do it.

“She never kindled,” he said, bemused. “We went to a doctor, she and I, to see which of us was wrong. The doctor said neither one. Then, in ‘60, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. Fred was her father’s name, you know. She had a miscarriage in ‘65, and we both figured that was the end of it. Then you came along in ‘69, a month early but just fine. And I just about loved you to death. We each had one of our own. But she lost hers.”

He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1973. He had been thirteen, Frannie four. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.