Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“Yes, I do, Daddy.”

“Well, I think...” He hesitated. He suddenly felt inadequate. “I think you should ask yourself whether or not, well... if he wants you to wait for him, Kate, this would indicate he’s pretty serious, wouldn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t be like getting engaged or anything, Dad.”

“I understand that.”

“But I couldn’t go out with anyone else, either. I’d be his girl.”

“Yes, I know.” Matthew paused again. “Well, he’s a very nice boy, Kate.”

“Yes, he is, Dad. Not at all hoody like some of the other boys around. But...” She shrugged. She picked up her coffee cup and stared into it, and then swallowed another gulp.

“Kate, maybe you’re a little young to be tying yourself down to someone. You’ll be getting out of school this summer, you’ll probably want to make plans for college, you—”

“Yes, I know, Dad. The only thing is, you see, I wouldn’t want to hurt Paul. I think he might be very embarrassed if he asked me to wait for him and I said no. You see, I do like him, and he is awfully nice, and I’m very flattered and all, but... well, I wouldn’t want to hurt him, especially when he’s going away to the air force. Because I like him, Dad.”

“I think it takes a little more than that, Kate. I think you should consider whether there’s more than just liking him.”

“Well, I like him a lot, Dad. But then...” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Mrs. Regan asked me if I’d like to go with her this summer, you know, when she goes to Italy, and—”

“I didn’t know that,” Matthew said.

“Yes. So there’s that to consider, too. I was going to ask you, Dad,” she said hastily. “I wouldn’t just accept without...”

“I know you wouldn’t. But I don’t see how the trip would affect—”

“Being away and all, I mean. And suppose I go to college in the fall... well, I don’t know what to do, Dad. Actually, I may not even go to college.”

“That’s up to you.”

“But I still don’t want to hurt Paul before he goes away.”

“Kate, do you love him?” Matthew asked flatly.

“No.” She paused. She looked into her empty coffee cup. “I love someone else.”

“Then that settles it, doesn’t it? It has nothing to do with the air force or the trip or college or anything but the fact that you love someone else.”

“Well, this other person doesn’t even know I exist, Dad.”

Matthew smiled. “How can anyone not know you exist, Kate?”

“Oh, it’s possible, all right,” she said. She smiled wanly, got up, and walked to the stove. “Would you like more coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

She returned to the table, poured herself a fresh cupful, put the pot back on the stove, and said, “Believe me, Dad, it’s possible,” and the kitchen went silent.

“Kate...” he said, and he paused. Go on, he thought, be the father. Make the father speech. He felt very clumsy all at once. “Kate, you’re a young girl,” he said. That’s a wonderful beginning, he thought. Always start with the obvious, especially when your daughter is someone as bright as Kate. “You’re a young girl and...” He groped for words. Amanda should be doing this, he thought, and then he saw that Kate was watching him, and listening to him intently, and he realized that he’d made the mistake again of thinking she was truly adult, of assuming she already knew what he was about to say. But she didn’t. She was a young girl, and this was all new to her, and she wouldn’t have begun discussing it if she hadn’t hoped for assistance. He suddenly thought of the skate key again, holding the skate and showing her how the key worked.

“Kate,” he said, “the important thing to think of is...” In a split second, he thought, No, don’t tell her that, don’t tell her to hurt this boy, don’t tell her to think only of herself, and he remembered when he was eighteen and he thought of a girl named Helen Kennedy and he wondered suddenly what Paul Marris had done to his daughter Kate. But very carefully, and all in the space of several seconds, he phrased what he was about to say, almost as if he were summing up a case for the jury, but this time he was only summing up a life, so how do you sum up life in a Connecticut kitchen on a sunny Sunday morning to a troubled girl of seventeen, how do you do that? It was so easy with the skate key, he thought, Jesus, it was so easy. How do things get so complicated?

“Kate,” he said, “I like Paul, he’s a nice boy. I’m glad you’ve been going out with him. I think Mother likes him, too. I think he’s sensible and levelheaded and nice-looking, but none of this matters a damn if you don’t love him, because there are a lot of nice-looking, sensible, levelheaded people in this world, and you’re going to meet a great many of them and, Kate, you can like them all, but that isn’t love, and if you loved Paul, you wouldn’t have to think about it twice, you’d know exactly what you wanted to do.” He paused. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I met your mother.”

I’m doing this all wrong, he thought. I sound like the voice of the ages, the wise old man of the hills, she hasn’t experienced this, damn it, she doesn’t know that people come and go, she doesn’t know what life is all about.

Yes, and do you? he asked himself.

“Kate...”

Do you? he asked himself.

“Kate, I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt your mother,” he said. “I’d strangle him with my bare hands.”

Yes, and that explains love, doesn’t it? That explains it all to a seventeen-year-old girl who is going to a dance tonight where someone will ask her to wait for him, did I ask anyone to wait for me? No, but Amanda was waiting. Amanda was...

“Kate,” he said, and suddenly realized he could not talk to her, and was filled with a desperate lonely sadness. I cannot talk to my own daughter, he thought. “Kate,” he said, “you’ll know when you’re in love, don’t rush into anything,” crap, he thought, baloney, bull, crap, nothing, why can’t I talk to her, and tell her what, and tell her of the girl on the hill overlooking the town, and tell her of Helen Kennedy, and tell her of the girls in Boston, and tell her of Kitty Newell, all of whom I loved in a way, all of whom took a part of me, Matthew Bridges, and from whom I accepted something, tell her not to hurt, tell her to be kind, “Kate, don’t hurt him,” he said, tell her of a love beyond the physical exchange, did she know of this already, has she been kissed, has she been touched, what can I tell her, and why can’t I speak to her?

So all the platitudes came out, all the father-daughter jazz evolved from a long line of father-daughter conversations starting with Eve and the biggest father of them all, and ending perhaps with Tracy Lord in Philadelphia, and he thought wildly of love as he explained patiently to her, explained that Paul would be more hurt if she accepted his love when she really couldn’t return it, thought of his very real and long-ago concern with people until somewhere he had lost the capacity, thought how sad it was to be sitting here with a daughter who was almost grown up, a daughter troubled because she didn’t want to hurt someone she liked, and thinking back to all the people he had possibly hurt in the past, and telling her she had a long life ahead of her, and that one day she would find the person she instinctively knew was the right person for her, telling her this while believing there was no single right person in the world for any other person, but giving his daughter all the time-honored crap while recognizing that something very important was happening then and there in the sunny Connecticut kitchen while Amanda played piano in the living room, recognizing that he was about to lose her because they could no longer talk together.