Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“What makes you think I’m ill at ease?”

“You’re always ill at ease. You’re always so tense. It must be television does it to you. Television is a rat race.”

“How do you know?”

“I read a book about it.”

“Oh, well then, okay. If you read a book, I guess it’s so.”

“Stop it, David. Look, I’m warning you. Stop treating me that way.”

“I’m only—”

“You’re only laughing at everything I say, and that isn’t fair. I’m not a moron, David. I’m six—” She cut herself off. “I’m almost seventeen years old, and I’m pretty aware of what’s going on around me in the world, and I’m perfectly capable of holding an intelligent conversation, so cut it out!”

“Okay, what would you like to talk about?”

“You. What do you do in New York? Besides getting drunk all the time?”

“I don’t get drunk all the time. I have a drink when I get back to the apartment each evening, and I usually drink something later on in the night. And when I’m in Talmadge, I hardly drink at all.”

“The people in Talmadge are very hard drinkers,” Kate said.

“Do you think so? The people in New York aren’t exactly slouches.”

“I think everyone’s drinking more nowadays. And everyone’s more tense. Don’t you feel that? You’re very tense.”

“I suppose I am.”

“It’s because of the bomb and those stupid Russians. I don’t care what anyone says, I can’t see how the constant threat of atomic disintegration can help but affect a person’s everyday thinking. Subliminal, they call it. I know it affects me. I wake up each morning, and wonder if I’ll still be alive at the end of the day. Of course, I don’t imagine they would bother dropping anything on Talmadge, but if they drop it on New York, everyone’ll rush out of the city like barbarians, and no one will be safe. Daddy says he wants to buy a rifle. Did you read On the Beach? ”

“Yes.”

“They’re making it into a movie, you know. But I don’t think it’ll be that way at all, when it comes, I mean. I don’t think everyone will just go off into a corner to die very nobly and very peacefully. I think the world will just cut loose and become positively animalistic. When the bomb comes...”

“When? Not if?”

“Oh, when it comes, David. Everyone knows it’ll come. We all know it.”

“Who’s we?”

“The kids. The... well, the young men and young women of America,” she said pompously, hating herself for having said “kids,” especially when things finally seemed to be going so well, when he was beginning to treat her like a person at last. “Why do you think there are all these teen-age gangs today, and rumbles in the street? It’s because they know the bomb is coming, and they can’t see any sense to living up to a moral and ethical code that has become meaningless. When civilization itself may be wiped out at any second, why bother living by its rules? Well, David, look at the quiz-show scandal... you don’t handle any quiz shows, do you?”

“The firm does, but we’re clean.”

“Well, anyway, look at that, look at the moral deterioration of all those fine people, David. Do you think it was because of the money? Absolutely not. It’s because everyone knows the bomb is coming.”

“ I don’t know it,” David said.

“You, of all people, should know it.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re so hard. Or at least you try to pretend hardness. You’re not really hard at all.”

“Do I seem hard?”

“Yes, you seem terribly menacing. You’re the only man I know who has white hair.” She hesitated. “It’s very attractive. Agnes thinks you’re quite the most attractive man she’s ever seen.”

“Thank Agnes for me.”

“Of course, she has no gusto ,” Kate said, and she smiled.

“Well, what are you going to do when the bomb falls, Kate?”

“Run like hell,” she said, and then she giggled. “No, not really. I’ll probably find somebody and live in sin with him until the radiation sickness kills us both. I mean, I wouldn’t want to die without having...” She paused. “Well, who knows what anyone will do in the face of extreme emergency? What will you do?”

“I’ll hop on the first plane to Los Angeles,” David said immediately.

“Why Los Angeles?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s as good a place as any to die. Also, it’s going West. And ‘going West’ means dying, did you know that?”

“You’re lying, aren’t you? I can always tell when you’re lying.”

“No, no, scout’s honor.” He raised his hand in the three-fingered salute and grinned. “Going West has passed from the vernacular to—”

“I didn’t mean about that. I meant about why you want to go to Los Angeles. There’s another reason.”

“Nope. No other reason.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Nope.”

“Then why would you want to go?”

“Just to see it. I understand the climate is nice.”

“My plan sounds like a better one,” Kate said shrewdly. “Besides, I think we both have the same thing in mind, only I’m considering it a bit closer.”

David laughed. “Does your father know you talk like this?”

“Of course. We’ve resolved the whole thing.”

“What thing?”

“The Electra bit. We’re buddies now. I’ve decided to leave him to Mom,” Kate said, and smiled again.

“I’m sure Mom is relieved.”

“Well, it can be a strain, you know,” Kate said. “Here’re our sodas.” She smiled at the waitress. “Thanks, Connie.”

Sitting and listening to her, David was enchanted. There was such an impossible combination of reality and fantasy, such a blending of child with young woman, such a mixture of worldly concern with juvenile irresponsibility, that he picked his way through the conversation like a man walking through a mine field, and yet he was enchanted. He was thirty-four years old and, he supposed, an eligible New York bachelor who circulated in a hip television crowd where the questions were fast and the answers were ready, but he had never come across anything as refreshing as Kate. He knew this was because she was still a child, but he saw no reason to belittle charm simply because it was worn by youth. He found her thoroughly enchanting and delightful, shining and new, looking at the world with untarnished eyes, seeing everything so clearly and so simply.

He wondered suddenly if he had been that way at sixteen. It seemed to him he had always been a little uncertain, a little shy. But then, he supposed everyone looked back upon his youth as a time of awkwardness. There was an awkwardness in Kate, too. She was groping out of adolescence toward an adulthood that seemed so very far away to her, seeking acceptance in a world that, just a short while ago, was the world of the “grownups.” But it was not the awkwardness that stamped her youth. It was instead a lack of artifice, a lack of sophistication. She had not yet acquired the gloss, the infinite variety, of the adult. She was Kate Bridges, and sixteen, and herself, and certain of the world and of her place in it, and certain too that a hydrogen bomb would fall on her head one day, and yet accepting the certainty with blithe, almost joyful, indifference. She was Kate Bridges.

He felt a sudden pride. He had known her when she was just a little girl, and he sat opposite her now in a tearoom in the month of May, and she chatted with him like a young woman, and he felt an almost paternal pride in being with her, as if he were responsible in some small way for her growth. And he felt privileged to be sitting here with her at this time of her life, before she had acquired the polish, before she had become too fully aware of the world around her, before age stole in and life forced her to toe the mark. And he felt, too, a fondness for her, a protective fondness, an empathy that cried out over the years like a race memory, I was once this young, my eyes were once this clear. He was glad he’d asked her to have a soda with him. He was glad, even with the missiles poised, even with some trigger-happy nut possibly waiting to push the button, he was glad that he could sit in a tearoom in the month of May with a sixteen-year-old girl and feel something that he could only describe as hope.