Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The lake. Sun. Water. Easy living. Same old stuff. I was tempted to go back home and play the suite today.

JULY 17

Lake. Swimming. Outdoor barbecue tonight.

JULY 21

Lake.

JULY 25

Lake.

AUGUST 14

Party at Julia’s house. David there with a television actress named Betsy something. In the John, she asked me how well I knew David. She said he had asked her to go with him to Puerto Rico for a week, and she wondered whether she should or not. They would have separate hotel rooms and all, she said, but she wondered if it would look bad. I couldn’t begin to advise her. She’s only 23 years old, and yet I felt she was so much wiser and more experienced and older than I am. Would I go to Puerto Rico with a strange man?

No.

AUGUST 24

Lake. I have been reading magazines all week. I refuse to believe that American women are solely concerned with, in the order of importance:

1) How to convert their kitchens on $500.

2) 400 ways to prepare potatoes.

3) The Royal Box by Frances Parkinson Keyes.

4) Toilet training.

I refuse to believe it. I’m not a snob, but I refuse to believe that American women are quite that shallow or quite that self-centered or quite that witless.

In China, the Communists are talking about invading Formosa and President Eisenhower has all but promised the Seventh Fleet will leap to the rescue — but the magazines are worried about the new eye make-ups.

We don’t need eye make-up. All we need is a few peepholes in our hoods.

SEPTEMBER 6

Labor Day. Barbecue party at the lake. Klein, Regan, Bottecchi, Anderson, Phipps. Broke up early. Drove back to the house in Talmadge. It’s good to be home. It’s always good to come home again. I sometimes forget how beautiful the house is, or how much it means to me. I tried a few notes on the piano. It needs another tuning after lying idle all summer.

I envy the children in September. Wednesday is Bobby’s first day of school, and Kate starts at the junior high. Gave permission for her to wear lipstick. She immediately called Agnes and said, “My mom says okay, so now your mom’ll have to say okay!” Matthew calls her “the con man.”

I am very anxious to begin work on the suite again.

SEPTEMBER 17

The minor key section has bogged down. I worked steadily on the passacaglia, needing only a modulation to take me from the restatement of the major theme, but nothing as florid as the Tristan and Isolde prelude — and suddenly it dried up. I mulled around all day before leaving it and going back instead to the revival section which seemed to suggest augmentation. I’ve given it a dancy counterrhythm now by using a left-hand arpeggiated figure. Maybe I’m procrastinating. But I will get back to the minor key section as soon as I have an idea. And meanwhile, I like this variation on what I had earlier. These are the first several bars:

SEPTEMBER 18

Called Fred Carletti about the new garage door. He left chalk marks all over it, claimed that was the way the lumber yard marks its lumber and that the chalk would come off with soap and water. Parsie was out there all morning and the chalk marks are still there. Fred doesn’t feel like coming back to sand them, but that’s his problem, and I still haven’t paid his bill. Saks Fifth agreed the clasp on my hand bag must have been defective, and are ready to exchange it. Must give it to Parsie for United Parcel’s pickup truck. Bulbs arrived today, should hire a man to help me get them in.

The woods are alive with color!

SEPTEMBER 19

Invitations out for the party on October 2nd. Ask Matthew to check his liquor. Do we need a bartender? Matthew says a bartender inhibits whiskey consumption. But it frees Matthew for socializing and being the host. Six of one, half a dozen. Agreed to work on committee for clearing Talmadge roads of empty beer cans dumped by high-school kids. Suggested local boy-scout troops handle the actual clearance. Zoning meeting at Town Hall Thursday night. Parsie’s day off. Must get a sitter. Or can Kate sit?

SEPTEMBER 21

First day of Autumn.

I sometimes get so bored.

OCTOBER 12

Meeting Matthew in town tomorrow for dinner and theater. He thinks he can get seats for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial .

I would much prefer Tea and Sympathy .

The law offices of Bridges, Benson, Summers and Stang were located in an impressive forty-story structure on Wall Street, nor had the location been chosen by caprice. The firm dealt mostly with criminal law, and the Criminal Courts Building was on Centre Street, not five city blocks from Matthew’s office.

Amanda Soames Bridges, who enjoyed the unbending logic of music, could appreciate the mathematics that made proximity to the criminal courts desirable. She could appreciate it, but she found it increasingly difficult to enjoy, especially on days like this when she was forced to make the long haul from the midtown shopping area to Matthew’s office. She had never liked driving, and she loathed driving in city traffic. The streets seemed more congested than ever, with more taxicabs and more buses, and bigger automobiles, would Detroit never stop making their cars bigger and shinier, were Americans determined to have the absolute biggest of everything in the whole world? The streets, too, were cold and bitter. She could hear the wind whistling over the hood of the car, rattling at the windows, so cold for October.

She pulled into the parking lot on Chambers Street, put the claim ticket into her bag, and began walking swiftly toward Matthew’s office building. The sun at four-thirty was almost gone. The wind knifed through the concrete alleyways, cutting through her skirt. I should have worn a coat, she thought. This stole is for a true autumn, but there won’t be any damn autumn this year. She was grateful for the lobby of the building. She took the elevator to the twelfth floor, stopped in the ladies’ room at the end of the hall to comb her hair and repair her lipstick, and then walked down to Matthew’s office, pausing just outside the entrance door. She always thought of it as Matthew’s office even though there were four names on the door, even though Benson and Stang were the senior partners of the firm. The fact that Matthew’s name headed the listing was a tribute to his powers of persuasion, as was the décor of the office itself.

“Look,” he had said to his new partners, “it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. You can stick my name on the bottom of the door in letters usually reserved for escape clauses. The door can read Benson, Stang, Summers and Bridges, just the way you want it to. I’m the junior partner, and I really have no business suggesting anything radical.”

Stang, fifty-seven years old and sporting a potbelly and a bright checked vest, had tweaked his nose and said, “Matthew, you are the biggest bull thrower in New York City. Say what’s on your mind.”

“Okay. The sound of Bridges, Benson, Summers and Stang is cleaner. That’s what’s on my mind. It reads simpler and swifter, and it’s easier to remember. It creates a corporate image that is good for our purposes.”

“What are our purposes?” Benson asked. Sniffing at a nose inhaler, his long thin legs propped on a hassock, he looked at Matthew sourly and then shook his head as if he were dealing with a maniac.

“To get clients,” Matthew said. “To become the biggest law firm in the city.”

“We’ve been doing all right so far,” Benson said.

“We’re going to do better.”

“Sometimes I wonder why we took you in.”