Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The retired navy commander was in the middle of his speech by the time Julia reached the town hall. She wondered briefly if her son had struck a commander, I think we should wait a while, Mother, before telling anyone I’m back in the States , his letter had read, and then simply say I’ve been assigned to the shore patrol here at Camp Elliott. I think that would be best, don’t you? Why did trouble always come in batches, she wondered, and of course she would have to do something now, she couldn’t simply, no she had to do something, tomorrow, she would take care of it tomorrow. She joined the Talmadge townsfolk and the Talmadge commuters who stood around in slacks and sunglasses and made faces indicating they were above all this patriotic and sentimental corn, and at the same time made complimentary and contradictory faces that indicated they relished all this corn and sentimentality, the nation being in the grip of a war for democracy, or whatever they were calling it this time, egli é morto . Julia bent her head and sat on the rock near the giant oak, the rock carrying a plaque that explained that Hessian forces had been driven from Talmadge, Connecticut, in 1779 by the Continental Army, and that the parish house had been burned by the retreating British. She heard the buzz of something in the new green grass and saw her first bee of summer and was then aware of the girl Gillian leaning against the tree and listening intently to the words of the retired navy commander, her arms folded across her white sweater.

The American Legion rifles went off, and then the town’s best bugler played Taps while the smoke from the rifles drifted across the town hall lawn, and then the echoing chorus came from behind the school building and someone jokingly whispered that next year they were going to have an echo of the echo with the third bugler stashed away in the hills of the next town, and Julia saw the girl Gillian frown momentarily and turn to shush the jokester. She kept her eyes on the girl. The distant notes of the second bugle hung like the rifle smoke on the sticky noonday air, faltering, unclear, magnified somehow by the heat, and magnifying it in turn, reminding everyone that summer was truly about to start. She looked at the girl Gillian and saw a thin sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. The girl was listening to the notes coming from the second bugle hidden behind the old school-house, listening with her head bent in silent thought, and then she lifted her right hand quite casually and brushed it gently across her lip, and suddenly Julia Regan wanted to weep.

And she knew this moment would be captured for her forever, encased in a permanent indestructible bubble of time, the sound of the bugle echoing on the still and silent air, the thin sheen of perspiration on the young girl’s lip, her head bent in rapt silence as she listened, and her slender hand coming up casually, unconsciously, in a gesture that seemed so very familiar to Julia, a gesture that somehow recalled for her in a sweet rush of painful memory her youth, her youth, and she watched the girl Gillian until the moment was gone and there remained on the rock with its historic plaque only the thirty-nine-year-old woman named Julia Regan whose life had been secret after secret after secret in the golden sunshine, and then the echo died.

Oh, the summer went by somehow. Somehow the summer went by as all summers do, in fat and lazy reticence. Although they were dying on the beaches in the Pacific and there was sugar and gasoline rationing and it was difficult to get new tires for old cars, the summer of 1943 went by. Summer storms came and went with sudden fury, and people read the newspapers anxiously to see how our boys were doing, and there was a change in the physical face of America, uniforms everywhere. In Norfolk, Virginia, it was difficult to see anything but white hats bobbing down the main street on any afternoon after three-thirty, and the Army Air Corps took over a great many Miami Beach hotels, and 4-F became an expression that could cause fist fights in bars. But somehow the summer went by, and somehow there were still relics of peace, and somehow the war seemed very distant.

On the beaches of America, the record players spun all the popular songs, “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” and “Mairzy Doats,” and kids lay on the sand in sun-tanned splendor, clean young bodies and clean white teeth and straight legs, and hummed to the whirl of the records and twisted straws in empty Coca-Cola bottles and listened to the distant rush of water against sand, and the war was very far away. Somehow the amusement parks managed to keep their Ferris wheels spinning, and there was black-market gas to be had, and butchers got richer and fatter selling black-market meat to favored customers. Every now and then, someone was startled to see a gold star in the window of a neighbor, or shocked to learn that an American transport had gone down with all hands and the son of a neighbor or relative was aboard. But the church socials went on, and the dancing continued, and girls and boys alike wore their hair in pompadours, and the Windsor knot came into popularity, and skirts were shorter, and perhaps morals were too, some of the war wives were whooping it up in a fling at second childhood with the teen-agers whose attitude was Kiss Me My Sweet, and a burlesque revue assembled by Mike Todd and called Star and Garter was still knocking them dead on Broadway. Somehow the summer went. War wasn’t all that much hell after all. War to Americans, in fact, war to the Americans at home — who waited for letters scrawled from muddy Sicilian ditches by men who crawled with lice, by men who huddled together while Stuka bombers screeched out of the sky and tanks loomed on the horizon — was kind of exciting.

There were motion pictures like The Watch on the Rhine , which made everybody hate those dirty Nazi bastards, and This Is the Army , which made everybody love our patriotic boys, and Casablanca , which made everybody love a song called “As Time Goes By,” and people were watching time go by, laughing it up and drinking it up and loving it up, strange girls in strange towns met strange soldiers, and generally everything was a little looser and a little more frantic. War in fact, well war, to get right down to rock bottom, to get right down to the core of human reaction, to get right down under all that patriotic folderol and all that war-is-indecent and inglorious and disgusting, and nobody wants all this senseless maiming and killing, war when all was said and done was downright fun.

And somehow the summer went by.

“She’s screaming again,” Penny said. “I can’t stand her when she screams.”

The baby’s cries came from the open second-story window of the frame house in Otter Falls. Penny, sitting with her mother and her sister, put her hands over her ears and said, “Mother, make her stop.”

“It won’t hurt her to cry a bit,” Priscilla Soames said. “She has to learn sooner or later that she won’t be picked up every time she—”

“Mother, make her stop!” Penny said sharply, and Amanda, sitting on the porch steps, turned to look up at her sister.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“No!” Priscilla said. “Stay where you are, Amanda.”

“Why does she have to cry?” Penny asked, and Amanda continued to stare at her, and she suddenly wondered when Penny had stopped being her sister, when she had become only a somewhat thin and gaunt stranger who complained about her baby constantly, who never confided in Amanda at all any more, who seemed to roam the old wooden house in a silent angry world of her own. “What right does she have to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. I’m the one!”