Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

What Toni wanted — Later, when she thought of it from a more mature perspective, she recalled a child's brutal cynicism. What she wanted was to continue to sleep in her own room, with Pupp'l, to swim in her own pool, and to go cruising on Maxim's. That meant living with her father, and that is what she chose.

She had no sense of guilt about her choice; and later, when she might have thought that way, she understood that in fact her mother had been relieved. Blanche had had a ten-month affair with a Miami lawyer before Dr. Maxim found out. The lawyer, as Toni would learn in the course of visits with her mother, was contemptuous of psychiatry and offshore fishing. His own tastes, which her mother now proclaimed were her own as well, ran to golf and tennis.

Within a year Dr. Maxim married another tall, tanned, sun-bleached blonde named Morgana, who admired his boat and said she loved his daughter and his daughter's dog. She seemed sincere. She extended herself to become a friend to Antonia, and Toni accepted her. The exchange of mothers, after the initial shock and curiosity, was not painful.

When Antonia was fifteen years old, her years of innocence, the simplicity of loving Pupp'l, swimming in a backyard pool, and fishing off Maxim's , going to school at Seaview, and beginning to take an interest in boys, with nothing more troubling to worry about than the mysteries of trigonometry, came to an abrupt end — on December 7, 1941.

She had been interested in the war, of course — enough interested to have thumbtacked a National Geographic map of Europe on her bedroom wall and to push in red and white pins to mark the advances and retreats of armies. But it had all been remote, thousands of miles away. Within a few days of December 7, Maxim's was lifted from the water and trucked to a warehouse, where it would remain for — a term she learned to hate — "the duration." Worse — On a night in January she woke to the sound of a distant rumble and a dull red glow on the eastern horizon. A tanker had been torpedoed by a German U-boat, not twenty miles off the coast, in waters the Maxims had fished twenty weekends a year. It was too easy to say the war had come home. It had come into their very yard.

The beaches were closed. National Guard soldiers patrolled them day and night, stretching barbed wire and building barricades against raids by Nazi commandos. Fort Lauderdale was certain to be bombed or attacked by submarine-home commandos, and the town had to be prepared. Her father was summoned to a hospital, where he trained as a member of a Civil Defense medical emergency team. Her stepmother practiced as an emergency telephone operator at the Civil Defense communications center. When they went to these training exercises, Antonia was left alone in the house — as she would be if a raid happened. What was more, she was left behind heavily curtained windows — blackout curtains — and could not see what was happening outside. She switched off all the lights in the house and climbed through a trapdoor onto the roof, where many nights she sat alert and worried. Twice more she saw ships blow up off the beach.

Everything in life was in suspension for "the duration." She did not resent it. She was a patriotic American. Yet — Yet she realized she was losing an important part of her life. It was a little enough sacrifice, but it was real. For instance, her father had promised her he would buy a new car when she was sixteen and would give her his old Plymouth station wagon. Now he could not buy a new car, or buy enough gasoline to drive this one much.

She was introduced to sex about the same time, that is, when she was a little short of seventeen. Two boys somehow had accumulated enough gas to take two girls out into the Everglades in a big old dark-blue Packard. They parked, and the couples took turns walking along the road and looking at the flowers and wildlife, leaving the back seat of the car to the other couple. Half an hour, each couple promised the other. Toni was intoxicated by the feelings the experienced young man could induce in her, and she went further with him than she had intended.

Then she decided he had taken unfair advantage of her and would not see him again. She developed an affection for another boy, and for a few weeks they were intimate on the couch in her family living room — assured of their privacy by the despised blackout curtains. Twice they even did it on the roof while Piper Cubs checking the completeness of the Florida Atlantic Coast blackout flew overhead not more than two hundred feet above them. The darkened houses that did not silhouette ships for German submarines leaked no light to afford the pilots a clue as to what was happening on that roof.

In May 1944 she graduated from Seaview Academy, first in her class.

Her mother wanted her to go to Rollins College; her father's first choice was Emory University; and her stepmother urged her to apply to Radcliffe. She applied to all three, and others, and she was accepted at every college she applied to. She chose Radcliffe.

The photos she sent with her applications showed that she was an exceptionally pretty girl. She had by then lost the baby fat around her face. She wore her hair in a loose, careless style that obviously took only an occasional whip or two of the brush to control it. She was pretty but no contrived glamour puss.

The second Mrs. Maxim was active in Democratic politics. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1944. She saw to it that Antonia met as many as possible of the prominent Democrats who came to south Florida, and so Antonia was introduced to Senator Harry Truman, the peppery little man running for Vice President with President Roosevelt. He said he had a daughter her age — in fact, Margaret Truman was two years older than Antonia Maxim — and told her he hoped she would be as loyal a Democrat as his daughter was.

In the fall of 1944 she arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and within no more than a day she developed a troubling, even frightening sense that she was hopelessly narrow and provincial, inexperienced, naive, and ill-educated. After a month or so she amended her initial pessimistic judgment and decided she was provincial and inexperienced, not narrow or naive or ill educated. Before the semester ended she realized she was not provincial either, no more provincial anyway than the other girls in the college. No one, she observed, was more provincial than New Yorkers, followed by New Englanders. She learned that she could compete very handily with them.

Only when they spoke of their travels was she at a disadvantage. She had never seen Paris or London, or even Texas or California, but they had and could talk with brittle gaiety about this hotel and that restaurant and about how they hoped these places would survive the war. When they told stories of how they abandoned their virginity, Toni conveniently forgot the back seat of the Packard and said she had given up hers on a flat roof during a blackout, with low-flying planes buzzing overhead. None of them topped that story.

She was an excellent student. She majored in history, with minors in political science and languages. Her mother wrote her a letter suggesting she make an appointment with a Boston cosmetician recommended by a friend and have herself done over. She was so beautiful, her mother said, that she should make the most of herself and consider a career in modeling and maybe even acting.

She made few male friends. The boys who hadn't been in service were ... well, boys. Many of the returned GIs were married. Others were moody, and some were aggressive. She dated two of them and allowed one to be intimate, but they drifted apart, finding no great attraction in each other.