Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“Mom, I don’t want to—”

“What is there to say about my Meredith Burke and his little blond bookkeeper? What is there to say, Gillian?”

She paused and smiled, but the cheerfulness had gone out of her voice and her face minutes ago, and she smiled in limp confidence, so that her daughter now hated this more intimate view. It was no longer the view of a young trembling girl in wet clothing, but the view of a woman , infinitely patient, infinitely suffering.

“‘Does he still love you, Ginny? Ginny, does he still love you?’ he asked, and his hand on mine was warm, and I smiled, and he said he would like to see me again, and of course I said no.” Virginia shuddered suddenly. “It’s cold in here, isn’t it?” she asked. “You would think they’d be making heat already. Aren’t they supposed to be making heat in September?”

Gillian stared at her mother in fixed fascination. She did not know quite how to react. She felt resentment because she had not asked for this sudden intimate glimpse, and she felt anger because she did not want to know about her father and his bookkeeper or why he stayed downtown late each night. But she felt at the same time a curious attachment to her mother, felt closer to Virginia than she had ever felt in her eighteen years. And yet, paradoxically, she no longer felt like her daughter. She felt only like another woman, as if both of them had accidentally happened across each other in one of the dressing rooms in a clothing store and stood partially naked and strange to each other before separate mirrors. The glimpse was startling. She looked at her mother and saw only a strange person whose face and figure were vaguely familiar and yet totally alien. The hair, the color of the eyes, the wan smile most certainly belonged to someone she had known for a long long time. But the woman had a small birthmark on her cheek. Had that always been there? There were wrinkles at the edges of the woman’s eyes. The woman’s upper lip was not perfectly symmetrical. She could see a weakness in the woman’s chin. She felt like a camera moving in for a terribly personal close-up, coldly impersonal, a camera that moved in cruelly and swiftly to devour the vulnerable face of a pale sad stranger. She kept staring at her mother, not knowing her, and yet knowing her more completely than she ever had.

Virginia rose. She sighed. She picked up her coffee cup and started heavily out of the room.

“Wait!” Gillian said. Her mother turned. Gillian hesitated, about to say something. She almost reached out with her hand. And then, all she said was “I’m not going back to Talmadge.”

Virginia nodded. “All right.”

“I’m going to find a school in New York.”

“All right.”

“I’ve taken an apartment in the Village.”

Virginia Burke paused, but only for an instant. Then she nodded again and said, “All right.” She seemed suddenly very old. “Have you told your father?”

“Not yet.”

“He’ll want to know,” Virginia answered, and she walked out of the room.

The letter was on the long table in the dormitory hall when Amanda came back from her five o’clock class. There was a light covering of snow on the campus, and she removed her galoshes before the mirror and glanced cursorily at the stack of mail on the table, and then began leafing through it. She was momentarily annoyed because the letter had not been separated from the pile and put into her box. As a junior, she expected some courtesies and privileges. She looked at the pale-blue envelope and the New York postmark and then she studied the impatient hurried scrawl on the face of the envelope and turned it over to look at the flap. There was no name on the flap, only an address, and an unfamiliar one at that. But she knew instantly the letter was from Gillian Burke. She went up to her room, made herself comfortable on the bed, and began reading.

AMANDA DEAR,

I know you think I’m dead by now, but that’s not exactly the case, although I am pretty tired and close to exhaustion. It’s not easy to furnish an apartment — furnish, she says! — or to get into a new routine of things, and it’s taken a lot longer than I expected, and is really much more tiring than it would seem to be on the surface.

But I’m settled at last, or at least as settled as I will be for a while. It has been a long hard pull, believe me. And, as seems to be the case with everything in life, the resistance came from where I least expected it. I thought my mother would be the one to blow her top when I broke the news, but she took it as calmly as Lee surrendering at Appomattox. It was my father instead who hit the ceiling when I told him I was moving out. He wanted to know why, and I told him I was almost nineteen years old and that I owed it to myself as a person and a woman, oh this all sounds so stupid writing it, but I really think I made an excellent case for the emancipation of the American female, a case which unfortunately failed to impress Dad. He wanted to know whom I’d be living with, and I said I would be living alone, and he said “For how long?” He is a terribly sweet man, and I always felt he considered his daughter’s business her own business, and yet all at once he was behaving like a real old Irishman worried about virginity and such. He went into a huff for several days, barely speaking to me, and writing an airmail-special letter to my sister Monica in California, asking her (I found out later) to talk some sense into Gillian — me, that is.

Well, he couldn’t have picked a wronger person to write to because Monica answered by saying she intended to stay in California after she was graduated, and this totally demolished poor Dad, who began wailing in Irish accents about the ingratitude of daughters and such, and about rats leaving a sinking ship, all very flattering to Monica and me, the rats part, I mean. I must say that Monica behaved like a little bitch. She isn’t graduating until June, and she could have withheld her delightful news until then, knowing the trouble I was having. But she didn’t. So my father brought over his brother who runs a wholesale paint business on Long Island, thinking I would be impressed by the advice of an older, more experienced man than he, an uncle named Lonnie Burke whom my sister and I detested even when we were little girls and whom we used to call Uncle Long Drawers because he wore them winter and summer and they always showed beneath the cuffs of his trousers. This was the man who was going to convince me to stay on the auld sod! Uncle Long Drawers read me the riot act and warned me of the perils of living alone in a wicked city like New York, especially now when it was filled with servicemen from all over the world. Did I prize my maidenhood lightly? he asked. (Those were his exact words, Amanda.) I assured him that I prized it highly indeed, and that I did not intend opening a bordello on the West Side, which shocked him no end and sent him scampering back to Hempstead, or wherever it is he lives.

My father gave in at last, most ungraciously, it seemed to me. He said he would not give me a penny toward furnishing the apartment or keeping me in food and clothing. And he also said, in a gracious turnabout, that I could return home any time I chose and no more would be said about it. I thanked him for his kindness and then borrowed $200 from my mother and began shopping around for what I needed. I shopped along Third Avenue, and the one thing I’m really proud of is a big brass bed which I picked up for $56, but which I couldn’t resist. That is, the bed isn’t made of brass, only the headboard and the footboard, but it’s a big double bed and I have all the room in the world to twist and turn in, which I love to do. The apartment has two bedrooms and a sort of living-room-kitchenette. I stuck a cot in the second bedroom, and I picked up an old sofa on the Bowery for $12 which I was sure was crawling with vermin and lice and which I disinfected and aired for three weeks before I allowed it into the apartment. A boy I know made a coffee table for me out of an old wooden door — don’t you love those people who are so handy and can make all sorts of useful furniture out of old crumby things that no one has any use for? But he was really sweet, and he got some posters for me which I hung all over the place. The posters all say “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” but c’est la guerre , Amanda, and they do inspire all sorts of clever talk, not that I’ve much time for socializing, what with my heavy schedule.