Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The first snow came to Talmadge at the end of November. He could remember crying in his room alone because his mother was not there to see the model airplane he had started, watching the snow-flakes falling outside his window, and then a new rush of overlapping images, a flurry of speed. “David, we’re going to Aquila for Christmas!” He could not believe his father’s words, weeping and laughing at the same time, hugging his father, feeling his father’s coarse mustache against his cheek, and then feeling his father’s own tears. “We’re going to Italy, David. We’ll take her home with us!”

She was waiting for them in the garden in the villa. She was wearing a yellow dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and only a sweater was thrown over her shoulders although it was quite cold, she looked a little chubbier, “as round as a partridge,” David’s father said, and he hugged her, and she said, “David, you’re getting to be a man,” and he blushed and said, “I tried out for the handball team in school, Mom,” and she hugged him, and he felt suddenly happy in the garden in the villa outside Rome. They went everywhere in those two weeks, everywhere , the Spanish Steps, he counted them, St. Peter’s where he rubbed the foot of the bronze statue where the toes were worn away, the Coliseum, “Look, David! See the lions!” his mother shouted, and he turned abruptly to see three scraggly alley cats roaming through the ruins, and Hadrian’s Tomb, the Castel Sant’ Angelo sitting across the golden Tiber with the midday winter sun bright overhead, everywhere, they did everything, he ate tortoni at an outdoor café while his mother and father sipped their apéritifs and he watched two German officers sitting at a nearby table, the swastika bold and black on the white field of their arm bands, it did not seem as if a war were coming, the black taxicabs beeping along the streets, the long shutters in the windows of the hotels and apartment buildings, Aquila, 2,360 feet high and bitter cold, the skiers in their heavy sweaters, and the garden bright with winter sunshine where they sat bundled against the cold and his mother poured hot tea, Father watching with his blue eyes aglow, Aunt Millie coughing discreetly into her handkerchief. Rome, and a cold clear blue sky, a city of white and gold, a city within cities, a city beneath cities, and the promise that Julia Regan would come back with them to Talmadge when they left. He could not understand why they left Aquila without her. He could not understand why she had to stay in Italy longer.

Talmadge in the winter. January and February, the doldrum months. Lake Abundance caught in the grip of ice, the skating parties, he fell and bruised his hip once, there was a new girl in town, he became aware of her at once, her name was Ardis Fletcher, the boys said you could do things to her, her father was an engineer, March and a sudden burst of warmth, the forsythias blooming unexpectedly and then withering under a new attack of undiminished winter, she had told them she’d be home on April tenth, he had circled the date on the calendar in his room, April 10, April 10, hurry home, please.

In April, there was a cable. MILLIE ILL AND UNABLE TO TRAVEL. DEPARTURE DELAYED. LETTER FOLLOWS. LOVE, JULIA.

Love Julia. Cablegrams had a blue border. He hadn’t known that.

The promised letter did not arrive until the next week. Millie was unexpectedly worse, it said; she had begun coughing badly, and each night her temperature soared. A specialist had been consulted, every hope this was simply a temporary thing and not something more serious like pneumonia, in any case impossible to consider traveling home at this time, darlings, how terribly I miss you, understand and forgive me, it is imperative that I stay here with Millie, know that you have all my love, Julia.

June of 1939, the war talk stronger now, the world certain that Hitler would march, the letters continuing from Julia in the villa at Aquila, two a week, one to Arthur, one to David, at the end of June he kissed Ardis, her mouth was soft, she kept it open, “ Everyone here seems convinced that Hitler is bluffing. In any case, there does not seem to be a climate of preparation for war, no matter what you felt at Christmastime. I know this is foremost in your mind, Arthur, but believe me, darling, Millie and I are in no immediate danger. She is improving rapidly, and I expect we will be leaving for home in July. I shall contact the steamship lines today on my way to the post office. I’m sure we can book passage for the last week in July or, at the very latest, the first week in August . Carissimi, vi voglio molto bene. I will be home soon. ”

Julia Regan came back to Talmadge on August twenty-eighth, three days before Hitler marched into Poland. Millie was with her, looking remarkably well for her ordeal, but drawn somehow, her eyes curiously averted, as if her long illness were something shameful.

David held his mother’s hands and looked into her face and said, “You look different,” and she smiled at him, a rare and peaceful smile, and said, “But so do you, my love.” A hundred things to tell her, a thousand things, “Did you see my finger? It’s all swelled up from where a baseball hit it,” a million things to show her, the strange wild flowers blooming on the edge of the lawn. “Mom, I got an eighty-five in my geometry end-term,” so much to show, so much to say, “Tad Parker is shaving already, did I tell you? He wants to be an actor, Mom,” and his father’s eyes smiling, Julia Regan was home. Julia Regan was home again.

The image blurred, the focus changed, the molecules of memory swirled like fragments of dark metal in a magnetic field, black against white, and from the vortex there emerged a penetrating single memory, the sharp relentless memory of that single day, September, yes, that single fall day at Lake Abundance, yes, crystal-clear, knife-edged, horrifying.

It was Saturday, September ninth.

There was clear bright sunshine that day, and suffocating heat.

“Why don’t we go to the lake?” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

The lake was still and calm. There was not a ripple on its surface. It mirrored the pines. His mother was in green.

“Let me take your picture, Mom,” he said.

“Arthur, get in the picture.”

“No. I want to take the boat out.”

“Arthur...”

“I said no.”

Sorrow? Pain? What was it that flashed suddenly in his mother’s eyes? Fleeting, and then gone. She smiled for the camera. Click , the shutter went.

He saw the boat edging out from the dock. The lake was still and silent. All was still. The world was still. Behind the boat, the lake broke in a pie-shaped wake. There was stillness. A bird screamed into the shimmering heat from somewhere in the tops of the pines.

The boat was white on pine-stained water. His father was wearing a silly red straw hat, which she had brought back from Italy. David saw the boat get smaller and smaller as his father rowed to the center of the lake. The red hat became a tiny dot in the distance. From somewhere in the pines, hidden, the bird screamed again, and across the lake another bird answered.

“Where are the binoculars, Mom?” he asked.

He adjusted the focus. He could see the boat clearly now. The boat, and the lake beyond, and his father’s face shaded by the wide brim of the silly red hat.

“What’s he doing, David?”

“Getting ready to throw out the anchor, I think.”

“Why? He didn’t take a fishing rod, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

The sun was intense. He could feel it on his head and shoulders. The lake shimmered. The bird was silent now. David could see his father clearly as he stooped to pick up the heavy anchor, an anchor too big for so small a boat. He hesitated a moment, his hands holding the anchor over the side. Then his hands opened. Watching through the binoculars, David saw his hands opening. The anchor was gone. In the boat, the rope was swiftly paying itself out, coil after coil, following the anchor. Suddenly.