Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The Talmadge Volunteer Fire Department, a group composed of ninety-per-cent hick townie and ten-per-cent Madison Avenue commuter, a fraternal group who never attended the same Talmadge parties together but who were expected nonetheless to extinguish fires with great communal camaraderie, stood about in the schoolyard in their dress blue uniforms looking ill-fitted and ill at ease, and possibly hoping that a sudden fire alarm would put an end to their discomfort. Julia Regan, leaning against the wall with her secrets churning inside her head, watched a totally inept pack of cub scouts marching back and forth before the red-and-gold engines in blue-and-yellow slovenliness. The scout leader had graying temples, and his uniform was too tight, and he shouted orders like a martinet, and Julia wished he would hush, and she wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time why she bothered to attend these false town functions in this false-front town. She leaned against the shaded brick of the school building, a woman of thirty-nine, her long brown hair braided into a bun at the back of her neck, her eyes closed as she listened to the “Hup-tup-tripp-fuh” of the troop leader and heard the chaotic cadence of the eager cub scouts and thought, He is dead.

“Hello, Mrs. Regan,” the voice beside her said, and she opened her eyes, smiling automatically even before she knew who was speaking.

“Looks like it’s going to be a good parade,” Ardis Fletcher said.

“Yes,” Julia answered. “It does indeed.” She smiled limply. It was a smile reserved for women, a smile that tried to convey a fragility in direct contradiction to her physical structure. She was a tall, slender woman with a strong and beautiful profile, and the smile she turned on her female friends was one that better suited her sister, Millie. And yet the attempt was not unsuccessful. Despite the big-boned evidence of her body, Julia was thought of by the women of Talmadge as delicate and gentle, if a bit spirited. The men of Talmadge looked at Julia somewhat differently. She had learned very early in life that it was not necessary for a woman to be readily accessible to all men so long as she gave an impression of accessibility. The smile she flashed to men held the possibility of intimacy, promised an arduous and passionate woman if only one could reach her, a mysterious lingering smile with more than a touch of sensuality in it, and yet the smile of a lady. And so, to her credit, the men of Talmadge looked upon her as a good-looking widow — spirited, to be sure — who could possibly, just possibly, and only with the most infinite delicacy and patience, be had. The smile she turned on Ardis Fletcher was her woman-smile, but it was wasted on Ardis, who at nineteen was concerned with nothing more subtle than the shape of her own body, which was about as subtle as a tornado. If anything, Ardis with her bright-red hair and sparkling blue eyes, her short skirt and contour-hugging sweater, supplemented the dazzling splendor of the fire engines and the cub scouts and the school band, which had lined up beside the fire engines in a glittering display of tuba and cornet and trombone.

“Have you heard from Davey?” Ardis asked, and Julia flinched at her use of the diminutive in referring to her son, and noticed too that Ardis did not look at any woman she spoke to; her eyes instead wandered over the eligible male members of the holiday crowd, and one of Julia’s secrets caught in her throat, the fact that her only son David was not in the Pacific any longer but was instead in the Naval prison at San Diego, California. A convict. Her David was a convict.

“Yes,” she answered in her low, steady voice. “I got a letter only yesterday. He’s doing fine.”

“I haven’t heard from him lately,” Ardis said. She pulled down on her sweater, apparently feeling it wasn’t quite revealing enough the way it was. “Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

“Does he usually write to you often?” Julia asked.

“Mrs. Regan, all the boys write to me often,” Ardis answered, and she smiled suddenly, taking Julia into her confidence with that single gleaming burst of enamel, allowing her to join the sorority of worldly women, an honor Julia didn’t particularly desire on that hot day at the end of May.

“Well, David’s been busy,” Julia lied. “His ship is on a secret mission.” A secret mission, she thought. My entire life has been a secret mission.

“Oh, how exciting!” Ardis said. “Doing what? Is it the invasion? Are they going to invade Japan?”

“Dear, he wouldn’t even tell me ,” Julia said gently. “His own mother.”

“But you have been getting mail from him?”

“Oh, yes. I told you. I got a letter only yesterday.” And another letter the day before that, but not from David, another letter, he is dead, egli é morto . Memorial Day. A day for memories, a golden day, and my son’s harlot stands here in the hot sun and wiggles like a chorus queen, what secrets does she hold in that empty head of hers? How many men and boys have known the loveless white thighs of Ardis Fletcher, were you the first for him, Ardis?

“Tell him to write to me, will you? He’s kind of cute.”

“I will. And thank you, Ardis.”

“Sure,” Ardis said, and she swiveled off in an elaborate synchronization of hip and thigh and leg, and Julia could not resist shaking her head in slight displeasure. Still, she supposed they had to learn somewhere. She supposed there was an Ardis Fletcher in every town in America, on every city street, a vast auxiliary army of willing young ladies who performed initiation rites on the back seats of automobiles, in vestibules, on living-room couches, on grass as green as green as her skirt she stained her skirt that day the white skirt with the pleats the sun was so hot and her skirt became wrinkled and stained with grass his hand under her skirt one thick brown hand rubbing at the stain and the other hand beneath her skirt the knuckles pressing hard against her thigh she had stained her skirt and she twitched with new desire he could smell in the golden hot sunshine he kissed her again.

The festivities were about to start, she saw. The fire engines had revved their motors impressively, and the fraternal smoke-eaters had lined up behind the engines, ready to eat carbon monoxide if nothing else. The cub scouts stood at the ready, waiting for the signal to “Fuhhut motch! ” The brownies stood by, two by two, little girls, she thought, daughters, she thought, ready to walk down the town’s back road to the town hall where a retired navy commander would give a speech, after which the local American Legion troop would fire a twelve-gun salute, and Taps would be played by the town’s best bugler, the town’s second-best bugler playing the echo from behind the school building.

“Come on,” someone shouted, and she turned her head and looked across the road to where an old Ford was parked, a boy in a hooded Mackinaw sitting behind the wheel, a girl leaning out the window, her blond hair hanging over one eye, waving her hand. “Gillian, come on! They’re about to start! We’ll miss it, Gillian!”

She turned as the girl called Gillian moved away from the fire engines and broke into a girlish run across the schoolyard, a slender girl in sweater and skirt, her russet hair bobbing at the back of her neck, a curiously satisfied grin on her mouth. “I’m coming, Amanda,” she shouted to the parked Ford, running past the ranked town band, and then onto the macadam road where summer sat suddenly still and golden.

A butterfly touched Julia’s wrist.

She glanced at it, and then she heard the girl named Gillian say to the other college youngsters in the Ford, “I’d never seen a fire engine up close before,” and she turned again to look at the girl as she got into the car, and she thought, She moves with such grace, she is so lovely, and then the band began playing “Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends.” Julia hastily found a seat on the grassy bank lining the road, and the parade started with the fire engines creeping at a snail’s pace up the sticky road, followed by the stiff-backed and proud volunteers, and then the martinet leaning into an imaginary head wind and the cubs marching behind him with the vigor of ignorant stragglers. The brownies, buttressed by three firm-busted matrons, nodded at Julia as they filed past proudly, and then the town band wearing blue and white, trousers and shirts, blouses and skirts, blowing their horns and pounding their drums, and the townspeople crowding and shouting and cheering, and the girl Gillian leaning out of the back window of the Ford across the road, her eyes bright, her face aglow with a secret delight, secrets, Julia thought, secrets, I shall have to do something, of course, now I shall have to do something, I will see someone tomorrow, of course I will have to do something. The parade had passed, the parade was over. The Ford coughed itself into life and began driving toward the town hall, and the people of Talmadge, Connecticut, got off the banks and brushed their trousers and their skirts and began trudging up the hill behind the distant music of the school band, like a band of guerrillas carting a cannon across Spain.