Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

He hated her.

He hated the girl Bianca, too, the girl he had never laid eyes upon, the girl who was his half sister, the girl who had stolen love from him. In his hatred, he wanted to see her. In his anger, he wanted to know what the thief looked like. He was filled with an urgent need to get back to the hotel and ask the desk to locate a woman named Francesca Cristo, and he would call her and say, “This is David Regan. I want to talk to my sister. Put my sister on the phone.” And then he would arrange a meeting. And he would look at her. It was important that he see what she looked like. He wanted to study the face of the thief who’d stolen love from him, there was no thunderclap.

But the anger and hatred, dampened by the rain, gave way to a sadness, a melancholia bordering on self-pity, as he splashed through the puddles wearing the gray day around him, this is the way it ends, he thought, this is the way love ends. You meet a stranger on a flight of steps, and you take her hand in yours, and your mouth touches hers, and she’s a stranger, your life dwindles on the bed of a stranger you once loved more than anything else in the world, your life vanishes completely in the office of a man you’ve never seen before, this is the way it ends. So chalk it all up, he thought morosely, stand somewhere high above David Regan and look down on that poor pitiful bastard as if he is not yourself, and ask him what it’s all about, and he will tell you it ends in sorrow and in tears, he will tell you all love ends, even a love you carried inside you like a cherished hope. Here, at least here, there was love. At least with Gillian, there was love. But even that had ended in Rome where there’d been a beginning so long ago, there was no thunderclap.

But from the anger and the hatred and from the self-pitying moroseness, there came a desperation. He thought if only he could breathe clean air into his lungs, if only the streets could smell clean again after the rain, how he wanted to believe there was something more than duplicity and shallow hopelessness. If only today he had touched Gillian’s hand and found Gillian’s mouth, truly found her, if only today there had been a beginning, the way years ago his mother had found a beginning with a faceless Italian soldier, spawned a half sister and given to her a beginning, too, a life. I don’t know, he thought, I don’t know. I want the world to smell so sweet. Oh Jesus, love me, somebody. Somebody please love me.

There was no thunderclap, there was no sudden recognition.

He walked through the rain with his head bent and his shoulders slumped, and he remembered something Matthew had said a long time ago. They are the love bringers, Matthew had said.

He wondered idly what she looked like, his sister. He wondered if she had his mother’s eyes or nose or chin.

He wondered if she looked like him.

What love had she known, he thought, this girl who’d been born to his mother, what love had been brought to her? A slip of paper every month, was that it? A check for a hundred and fifty dollars in hard American currency, was that what she knew of her mother? Or did they tell her stories of the American woman who had come to Rome before the war, and found a life, and left a life? Did she ask questions, Bianca? The name seemed more real to him now. Repeating it in his mind gave it reality. Bianca. Bianca. Did she ask questions about the American woman? He found it hard to think of his mother as a woman, solely as a woman, found it difficult to construct an image of her here, in this city, a woman. She suddenly seemed like a person he had never known at all. Not his mother, not whatever mother meant, not some distant impossible figure of whom he expected impossible things, but instead a person who’d been in love here, and gone to bed here, and given birth here. A person first, a woman first, and only after this his mother. What had she carried inside her all these years, this woman with the child in Rome? What had kept her away, what could have possibly kept her away, shame, guilt, fear, what? What had gone on in the mind of this woman he’d never known, whom he was closer to knowing in this moment than he’d ever been in his life? He suddenly felt a vast aching sorrow. If there had been a tyranny in silence, there was now a finality in death. If only one or the other of them had held out a hand. It might have been possible. It might have been possible for them to have known each other not as mother and son, but simply as human beings. There was no thunderclap, but he somehow knew for certain that his life was not ending here in Rome. And then he wondered whether there ever were any real endings in life, or whether endings only nurtured new beginnings.

There were people in the streets. He saw them now. They walked with their heads bent against the rain. He could hear them talking to each other. He heard someone laugh. His anger was gone now, his hatred was gone, his self-pity, his desperation, even his sorrow. There was left only a piece of understanding, and not even very much of that, but he could feel the rain hammering him coldly alive again.

He would try to see her. He would call her and say, “Bianca, this is your brother. David. Did you know you had a brother, Bianca?” He would stay in Rome for a little while. And in that time, if it were at all possible to bring love to another person, he would offer love to his sister. If it were at all possible to know another person, he would try to know her.

He walked swiftly across the square.

The rain was cold on his face as he reached the steps and started to climb. He slipped on one of the landings, falling to his knees. But he got up again immediately and climbed the rest of the way without once looking back.

When the telephone rang, she knew it was David.

She left the dinner table and went to the phone swiftly, and then hesitated before answering it, filled with a sudden sense of dread. Apprehensively, she picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” she said.

“I have a call for Miss Kate Bridges,” the operator said.

“Yes, this is she.”

“One moment, please.”

She waited. There was a terrible crackling and buzzing on the line. She could hear the operator talking to someone else, and then an Italian voice came onto the line, and the American operator said, “Go ahead, please,” and she heard a very faint voice, and then the Italian operator again, and then the American operator frantically saying, “Go ahead, please. Go ahead, your party is on the line.”

“Kate?” his voice asked.

“David?”

“Hello, Kate.”

There was a long silence.

“I’m in Rome,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, I know, David.”

“Kate...”

“Yes, David?”

“It’s two o’clock in the morning here.”

“We were just having dinner,” she said.

“I hope I didn’t interr—”

“No, no,” she said quickly.

“How are you, Kate?”

“I’m fine, David.”

There was another long silence.

From the dining room, Matthew asked, “Who is it, Kate?”

“David,” she answered.

“ Who? ” Matthew said.

Amanda looked up from her plate. “It’s David Regan,” she said quietly.

“Kate... Kate, listen to me,” David said suddenly.

“I’m listening, David.”

“Kate, I’m an old man.”

“Yes, David?”

“Kate, I was born on October 4, 1924.”

“Yes, David?”

“I shouldn’t be calling you. I know I... but I just wanted to say...”

“Yes, David?”

“It’s dark here. My room is very dark. There’s only your voice, Kate.”

“What is it you want to say, David?”

“I’m coming home tomorrow,” he said in a rush. “My plane arrives at Idlewild tomorrow night at nine-fifteen.”