Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“I’ve got to go. I’m late now.”

He opened the door.

“I miss her, too,” his father said. “You mustn’t think I don’t miss her, too, Matthew.”

His father died in August, the same month that had claimed his mother. He died of cancer, and they buried him alongside Sally Bridges in the small town cemetery on a day heavy with sunshine and dust. He saw his aunts and his uncles for the last time at the funeral. They all seemed different now, like polite strangers — “Sorry, Matthew, awful sorry. Know we share your loss” — polite strangers with polite sympathetic half-smiles. Uncle Jeff looked old and no longer dashing. There were wrinkles around his eyes. Matthew’s cousins were all grown up now. Rita was as pretty as could be, but never as pretty as she’d been that day under the dining-room table, her black hair brushed sleekly back, her blue eyes wide as she whispered of family intrigue. Strangers, all strangers, whom he greeted with remarkable calm, no tears in his eyes, no tears on the face of Matthew Anson Bridges. Even when Birdie, dressed in mourning black, opened her black-silk purse and pulled out a yellow handkerchief, he did not cry, he would not cry. They stood by the open grave together as the coffin was lowered into the dust-dry earth, a family together for the last time. Aunt Christine dropped a flower onto the shining black lid of the coffin. Earth fell into the grave. He kept his head bent, his eyes were dry. They dispersed later like scattered leaves before a sharp wind. He knew he would never see them again.

He hated Harvard, and yet he loved it. His feelings for the school were much the same as his feelings for Boston. He had chosen Harvard because of its reputation, aware of the snobbery involved, hating himself for succumbing to the appeal of calling himself “a Harvard man,” and yet fully aware that Harvard had the best law school in the country. He hated the school because it wore its snobbery like a dicky under a dress suit, clean and starched, and yet seemingly unaware that the stiffly laundered front had no sleeves. He felt the same way about Boston. He loved the Commons and walking across the wide rectangle with the pigeons frightened into sudden flurried flight, but he hated the stupidity of meeting at the Plaza simply because everyone met there, when he would have preferred meeting in the subway. He loved the Boston girls and their insinuating prance, but he hated the tilt of their sophisticated noses or their casual assumption that they were at all cosmopolitan. He loved the cobblestones of the city and the streets where old gas fixtures still stood with electric lamps in them, but he hated the way its inhabitants calmly claimed the glory of a century and a half ago. He loved the river Charles snaking on its way, gold-ensnared in the wintry sunlight, loved the banks upon banks of reflecting bay windows. He loved the filth of Scollay Square and the burlesque houses, some of the roughest burlesque he’d seen anywhere, but he hated the contrariness of a city ordinance that forbade a totally naked girl from moving a muscle while she was on stage. “Paaaak the caaa in Haaavaaad Yaaad,” the Boston cliché, came to mean something more to him. For in that flat hard Boston sound, he could hear the echoing lifeblood of the city, a sound that combined the debutante and the slut, the upturned nose and the provocative wiggle. He came to know Boston through its women, the shanty Irish in the bars, and the high-class Jews in West Newton, and the finishing-school girls on Beacon Hill. They were all the same to him, and all inexplicably different — they were all civilized and proper, and they were all savages, and he loved and hated them the way he loved and hated the school.

“Everybody in that damn place talks through his nose,” he said once to a girl on Pinckney Street. Rain washed the cobbles outside, winter in Boston, there was a hush to the city, he could visualize John Adams strolling through these streets, there was that about the town, you could not steal history from it. “I’ve finally figured it out.”

“Whaaat did you figure out, Matthew?”

“Why they all sound the same. There’s this old man in the speech department, you see, who has either a nasal drip or a deviated septum, and he’s forced to talk through his nose because of this deficiency. But all our hard-working Harvard scholars, anxious to emulate the old bastard, have picked up this monstrous deformity and accepted it as the proper speech pattern for an educated man. I can guarantee, Betty, that twenty years from now, fifty years from now, I will be able to spot a graduate of Harvard instantly because every last one of them will talk through his nose instead of his mouth.”

Betty giggled and whispered, “Listen to the rain.”

“We’re raising a generation of nose-speakers,” Matthew said. “The Harvard mouth will eventually become an atrophied organ, like the sixth toe. Harvard men will begin eating through their noses and kissing with their noses, like the Eskimos.”

“Don’t you love rain?” Betty said.

“Ultimately, the mouth will disappear entirely on all Harvard men. The area below their noses will consist of blank, shiny skin. They will approach emitting a high shrill whine through their enlarged nostrils, and everything they say will sound like mucus.”

Hating the Boston girls and loving them, hating Harvard and loving it, he entered Harvard Law in 1939 with the third-highest average in his class. He had made no real friends on campus, had joined none of the clubs, and he made no real friends in law school, either. He would later think of Boston as a woman, only because most of the people he had known there were females. He wondered once why he wasn’t more involved with the people he knew, and then he thought of Birdie taking that yellow handkerchief out of her black-silk purse, and he felt like crying, not knowing why, and he thought, What the hell.

Now, in New York City, on Christmas Day, he lay in bed with his hands behind his head, and he could hear the gentle breathing of Kitty Newell beside him, and he thought again of calling Amanda. He wanted to hear her voice. He felt, oddly, that he knew her better than anyone else in the world. But he did not move from the bed, and eventually he fell asleep.

On New Year’s Eve, he decided definitely that he would call. He would dial Information and then argue with the operator until she yielded a number for Amanda somewhere in Otter Falls. He was reaching for the phone when Kitty walked into the room. She was wearing only a half-slip, the waistband pulled up over her breasts, wearing it like a short nightgown that ended just below her hips.

“Hey,” she said, “let’s take a nap.”

“What for?”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. We’ve got to stay up until the wee tiny hours.”

“All right,” he said.

“No funny stuff now.”

“I promise.”

“Because we need the rest.”

“I know. What’s that thing you’re wearing?”

“The latest creation, my dear,” Kitty said. “I do hope you like it.”

“It’s a bit daring,” Matthew said.

“Oh, yes. Yes, I know.”

“And revealing.”

“Do you think so?”

“And pretty damn provocative.”

Kitty laughed her deep lusty laugh, turned like a can-can dancer, flipped up the back of the slip, and, still laughing, ran into the bedroom. They went into the Broadway throng at eleven-thirty. They had awakened at ten and consumed half a bottle of Scotch before taking to the streets. They didn’t get back to the apartment until four-thirty, and Matthew’s plane was scheduled to leave at nine. He put her to bed and then sat by the window in an easy chair, watching the dawn come up over New York, the first time he had seen it in this city. At seven o’clock, he remembered Amanda and decided again to call her, but then realized it would still be the middle of the night in Minnesota. He dressed swiftly without waking Kitty. He nudged her gently before he left.