Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“No, I doubt it. A will contest very rarely involves the provisions of a will. Your son can’t say such and such a provision is no good simply because it doesn’t happen to appeal to him. He would have to base his contest on trying to prove you were mentally incompetent when you made the will, or that undue influence was exerted on you, or something of that nature. But this wouldn’t necessitate showing the separate agreement, which is a part of one of the will’s provisions. In fact, the separate agreement would be testimony to your mental stability. Only an idiot would leave half her estate to a man three thousand miles away on the basis of a verbal agreement.”

“I wouldn’t want—”

“Julia, I know what you wouldn’t want. This is Elliot Tulley.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll think about it, Elliot.”

“I suggest you think about it very carefully. And I strongly suggest that you allow me to revise the will and to send the separate agreement off to Fabrizzi for his signature and approval. As your attorney, this is what I suggest.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Sure, it’s only money.” Elliot paused. “How’s everything else?”

“Fine.”

“What were you doing over at the travel agency day before yesterday?”

“Elliot, you should have been an FBI agent.”

“How do you know I’m not? Planning a trip, Julia?”

“Maybe.” She smiled and picked up her handbag.

“It wouldn’t be to Rome, would it?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s none of my business, Julia, but this is a small town, and a man who’s alert can’t help hearing things. Milt Anderson says your heart—”

“If I’m going to have a coronary, Elliot, I might just as well have it in Rome, don’t you think?”

“It’s your coronary,” Elliot said, shrugging. “Have it wherever the hell you want.” He paused. “I think it’s amazing you’ve managed to stay away all these years, anyway.”

“You have to be ready to go back, Elliot. Otherwise, there’s no sense going, is there?”

“I guess not. And you’re ready now, are you?”

“I’m fifty-six years old, Elliot. I want to see... I want to go back before I die.”

“Everyone wants to go back before he dies, Julia,” Elliot said. “Call me as soon as you’ve decided on the will, please. I want to make those changes as soon as possible.”

“Elliot, really,” Julia said, smiling. “I do have at least a few weeks, don’t you think?”

Kate Bridges was seventeen.

She had turned seventeen in November, and now it was March; she had been seventeen for four months and the change was remarkable only in that it was nothing at all like a metamorphosis. The person who emerged from the chrysalis of sixteen still resembled Kate, talked like Kate, moved like Kate, and yet was truly a different Kate, the change was indiscernible and perhaps a little disappointing.

But oh, it was good to be seventeen.

It was marvelous to be alive and at the peak of beauty, to have a strong body and uncomplaining muscles, an appetite for life and living. It was wonderful to know you could laugh robustly and cry in unashamed torment. It was good to be able to magnify all the minuscule problems of living, and shoulder none of its responsibilities, it was good to be young, it was good to be seventeen.

Nor was this Booth Tarkington’s seventeen, nor Eugene O’Neill’s, this was not that magic age, that long-awaited phase of adolescence when the braces came off and the kisses got longer. Oh yes, it still included idyllic dreams and fresh discoveries, visions of romance and high ideals, it was still all these things, but seventeen had changed. Kate had been born in 1942 while her father was being exploded on a navy destroyer. She had been nursed on the waning days of a world war, and weaned on the threat of another, and so war or the promise of war was part of the fabric of her life. And yet the adults had managed to do something to the concept, had robbed it of all its glamour and excitement. If war came, there would no longer be the agony of deprivation, the banners-and-music excitement of seeing a loved one off, the free-and-easy love-making in moments stolen from the battle front, the weeping alone while the guns echoed far away, the tragedy of death in combat, the excesses a seventeen-year-old could really appreciate. The adults, instead, had invented the ultimate excess, and now war only meant annihilation.

And in annihilation, there was democracy.

There had been a time, back in those swinging days that were the forties, when a sailor in a San Diego bar, a sailor headed for the Pacific where he could very easily have his head blown off, would not be served a glass of beer unless he could prove he was over twenty-one years old. It was still tough to get a drink in San Diego, but it was fairly simple to get one in your own living room if you were seventeen years old and blessed with modern parents who understood that physically you were capable of doing the same things they did, possibly better, and that mentally you were struggling with the same day-by-day possibility of extinction, with a great deal more to lose since you had experienced a great deal less in the short seventeen years of your life. When the hydrogen bomb fell, if it fell, no one was going to separate the women and children from the men. There would be a blinding flash and ten seconds to say your prayers, and everyone would wonder in those ten seconds who had pushed the button, goodbye Charlie.

So seventeen was a different thing, a new thing, and Kate was a part of this new seventeen, a curious seventeen, which still included a freedom from most adult responsibilities, but which also included an adult attitude of tolerance that permitted participation in many adult activities. You could smoke at seventeen. You could have a drink at seventeen. You could drive a car. You could mix with your parents’ friends at cocktail parties, you could even dance with some of the men, you could discuss everything they discussed, no conversation ever stopped suddenly when you walked into the room, no one ever said, “Shhh, here are the kids.” It was casually assumed that you were almost an adult at seventeen, not quite, but almost. If you could kill at seventeen, if you could be killed in the indiscriminate indifference of a hydrogen bomb explosion, then surely you could be allowed the courtesy of adult treatment.

Kate was allowed this courtesy, as were most of her friends. She accepted it with a supreme ladylike poise that was sometimes astonishing. She could sit in a group of older men and women and discuss anything they happened to touch upon, perhaps too vigorously and with the extreme conviction of the very young, but nonetheless intelligently and knowledgeably. She could smile in maidenly restraint at the too-dirty joke told in her living room — and then later repeat it to Agnes and laugh vulgarly and hilariously when she delivered the punch line. She could listen to a conversation about morality and virginity, knowing she was still pure and relatively untouched, voicing her opinions in a low clear voice, and then pet furiously on the back seat of an automobile with a boy, his hands under her dress, her own hands exploring.

There was in Kate the woman.

They saw this in her, the other women, and the men. They saw in her the woman almost formed, and they were surprised by the glimpse because they could not remember themselves this way at seventeen, and indeed they could not because this was a new seventeen, quite different from what theirs had been. When they told stories of their own youth, they could remember with extreme clarity the single incident that propelled them into the world of the adult, that one memorable instant when their parents at last seemed to accept them as grownups, when they crossed the imaginary dividing line. But for Kate, there had been no crossing, there had been instead a gradual disappearance of the line itself. She had helped serve hors d’oeuvres at one of her parents’ parties when she was only ten. She had danced with one of her father’s friends when she was twelve. She had listened to a conversation about birth control when she was fourteen. There seemed to be no adult aversion to her growing up, no pressure to keep her a child. Instead, the adults surrounding her seemed impatient, even eager, to accept her into their world, to equate seventeen or eighteen with thirty-five or forty. She sometimes felt she was allowing them into her universe rather than being permitted to enter theirs.