Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

And yet, I destroyed something today. So maybe Matthew is right. Maybe all we want to do is wage war, destroy each other and ourselves. I destroyed a fragile warmth today. I destroyed a memory. I took a stranger to a place I once had loved, and because the stranger did not fit there, because the stranger questioned the validity of a memory, the memory itself was destroyed. I won’t go back to the university again.

And yet, it was a part.

JUNE 19

The annual P.T.A. dance.

I still don’t know quite what to make of it.

There are two musicians sleeping downstairs, and I’m sure they’re both drug addicts. I wonder if Kate is safe. Matthew is out like a light, after all his ranting and raving. The thing that happened was this. Someone on the committee asked me if I knew of a good band they could hire, and I asked Matthew, and he asked one of his partners who used to play saxophone. His partner, Len Summers, said he knew a very good drummer who had a small jazz combo, and he thought they would be happy to come up to Talmadge to play at our yearly dance.

Well, they came up. The first thing that happened was that the trumpet player left his horn outside the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan. I don’t know how anyone could possibly leave his horn on the sidewalk, but he managed to do it, and he made a few frantic telephone calls to friends in New York, and they finally located his horn and said they would drive up with it. In the meantime, the band — piano, bass, drums and tenor saxophone — played without the trumpet man. Well, not exactly without him, since he had his mouthpiece in his pocket, and he kept blowing through it like a kazoo, making the most horrible sounds which everyone in the band, I gathered, thought were very cool and progressive. The trumpet finally arrived at about 11 o’clock, and the band went into high gear.

It was along about this time that someone discovered the bass player and the tenor-saxophonist were both smoking a sweetish-smelling cigarette, and Teddy Bernstein, who is a biochemist, said the stuff was marijuana. You can imagine the stir this caused! We’re not even allowed to leave whiskey bottles on the tables because the dance is being held at the school. Everyone drinks, of course, and everyone gets drunk, but the bottles are all on the floor, under the table — which is where some people wind up by the end of the night. Matthew, who had hired the band, began to hear comments about the marijuana, and about the way the boys were playing really progressive jazz stuff which was nice to listen to, but not very good to dance to. Brant Collins, who was telling me again how beautiful I am, while discreetly exploring everywhere, told me he appreciated this far-out stuff, but not at a “family-type gathering,” the hypocrite! Matthew had drunk a lot of bourbon by this time, and was beginning to get a little angry. “These men are musicians! ” he kept saying over and over again. Not that anyone had denied they were musicians. Everyone had simply stated that they were a little far out, and a little hopped-up to boot. It was Brant Collins who finally went to Matthew and said he thought it was disgusting that a school dance should have hired a bunch of “junkies,” an expression he no doubt picked up from Mickey Spillane.

Matthew said he thought it was disgusting that the world was being overrun by people like Senator McCarthy and Brant Collins. Brant wanted to know what, exactly, Matthew meant by that, and Matthew said again, “These men are musicians , and entitled to respect!”

“We’re giving them respect!” Brant said. “More than they deserve.”

“Why don’t you go dance with some willing housewife?” Matthew said, and again Brant wanted to know what, exactly, Matthew meant by that, and I swear Matthew would have hit him if Elliot Tulley and Julia Regan hadn’t stepped in and separated them. The musicians were playing all through this, “How High the Moon”-ish stuff, oblivious to anything that was happening on the dance floor.

Well, the whole thing broke up at 1 o’clock, without any suggestion of overtime, which is unusual for the P.T.A. dance. The musicians found themselves in another quandary. Apparently the person who’d driven them up had decided to visit some “chick” in Westport, and they had no transportation home, and no place to sleep.

Brant Collins, who was sticking his nose into this thing all over the place and refusing to let it lie, said, “Go sleep in the street!”

Matthew, at the top of his lungs, bellowed, “In my house, nobody sleeps in the street!”

I don’t think he realized how funny that was because he kept repeating it over and over again.

“In my house, nobody sleeps in the street!”

So now there are two musicians sleeping downstairs in the living room, the bass player and the tenor man, the ones who were smoking the marijuana. Elliot Tulley took the other three home to sleep in his guest house. The trumpet player forgot his horn at the school, and Elliot had to go all the way back for it. I think that man is trying to lose his trumpet. I read somewhere that nothing gets lost or misplaced by accident.

One of them snores. I can hear him all the way up here.

Maybe I ought to ask Kate to lock her door.

I wish I understood Matthew.

JULY 5

Lake Abundance. We drove down to Playland last night to see the fireworks. It was jam-packed. I must say I didn’t enjoy it. Today we moved into the house here. I refused to take the same house we had last summer. I’m not superstitious, but one fire is more than I want in any lifetime, thanks. David Regan was up for the weekend with Julia.

I asked him about Gillian, and saw immediately that I shouldn’t have. He said Yes, he had known Gillian very well. I asked him if he still heard from her, and he said No, he hadn’t heard from her since the Fourth of July in 1949, 5 years ago, and that this was his annual celebration in honor of the occasion. He wasn’t drunk, nor had he been drinking, but he sounded very bitter. I told him how talented I thought she was, and I filled him in on some of the things we used to do together at school. He tried to affect indifference, but I could tell he was very interested in everything I had to say. From what I could gather, he must have met Gillian shortly after Matthew and I were married, which would place it sometime after the summer of 1946. My God, we’ve been married 8 years already, time is disgusting. Although he did say something about the blizzard of ’43, which I could barely remember, and I did recall seeing Gillian in, it must have been 1947, and her not mentioning David at all, so perhaps they met after that. Whenever it was, apparently it didn’t work out too well.

He’s a very strange person, I think. I get a feeling of total lovelessness between him and his mother, and yet I know they are mother and son, and I sense a bond between them, but there’s more there too, more than meets the eye. Julia seems to lavish more attention and love on my daughter Kate than she does on her own son. Of course, he’s a grown man, but still — it’s hard to put my finger on it. Kate said tonight that David was “cool.” I must agree that he is. He gives less to anyone than any other human being I know. Oh, he’s a fine conversationalist and he knows some wonderful jokes — the Russian joke he told, wasn’t that one of Gillian’s? — and he’s remarkably poised and at ease, but he gives absolutely nothing. And the oddest part is that I instinctively feel he likes me and Matthew, and yet he gives us nothing.

I don’t think these are the Frantic Fifties. I know it’s not alliterative, but I think these are the Distrustful Fifties.

I’ll bet people will eventually stop shaking hands.

JULY 14