Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

She began to wonder what he did when he was alone. Whatever curiosity she had experienced about men in general became a curiosity about Matthew. His new office in the Flatiron Building was suddenly a place of mystery and enchantment, a lair to which her man retreated to concoct and perform manly deeds. She would visualize him reading The New York Times behind his desk each morning, and then folding the paper and putting it aside, brushing it away from him with that impatient little gesture of his, gulping a cup of morning coffee (he would be holding the cup in both hands), reading through a brief, dictating to his secretary. She imagined him in court, he had already tried three cases successfully, stalking before the jury box and eloquently reducing the opposition’s case to something both horrid and stupid, his deep voice rolling impressively (touched with a slight Southern drawl), and she imagined the ladies on the jury watching him with fascination and thinking, My, how handsome he is!

She tried to penetrate to the secret man himself in her fantasies, seeking the Matthew who was not hers but the Matthew who walked alone in a world of men, wishing to embrace this solitary figure as well, transcending the concept of Matthew and Amanda as a couple, and reaching into a private world that belonged to Matthew alone. In this world, she could watch Matthew shaving each morning, could see him leaning close to his mirror, stretching the skin on his face perhaps — did it hurt when he cut himself? She could imagine Matthew in his pajamas, he would not wear a top, she knew. His chest would be hard, and the pajama bottoms would curve loosely over his flat abdomen. She wondered what he felt like. When they danced together, when he held her close, she could feel the rigid arc of his masculinity against her, and she longed to touch him now, longed to look at him and learn him. There were so many questions to ask, and she knew she would ask them only of Matthew, knew she could learn from no one but him.

But knowing this, holding in her mind an elaborate past of terrible arguments, tentative explorations, frustrated tears and spontaneous glad laughter, minuscule sharings that piled imperceptibly into a giant conspiracy in which they stood alone; living a present that was heady with spring and the image of Matthew in a city still flushed with victory; imagining a future, constructing an eternity with Matthew by her side; this, all this, like the stop-action photos of the opening flower, was not truly perceived by Amanda. The process seemed quite natural to her. This was the way people fell in love. This was the way people got married. If the memory seemed blurred to her later, it was only because each separate image was almost identical to the one preceding it. If the girl who took Matthew’s call in the college dormitory was a tightly closed bud, then the girl who was married more than a year later in her father’s church in Otter Falls, Minnesota, was surely the blossom in the final triumphant shot — but she remained unaware of any real change, the memory would be blurred for her forever.

She stood beside Matthew nervously and listened to her father, and felt a frightened gladness, and wanted to cry, but she had to listen, she was getting married, she was marrying Matthew.

“Do either of you know of any reason why you both should not be legally joined in marriage, or if there be any present who can show any just cause why these parties should not be legally joined together, let him now speak or hereafter hold his peace.”

The church was silent. Somewhere behind her, she could hear Penny weeping. She turned her eyes sideward beneath the white veil, her head bent, and stole a glance at Matthew.

“Do you, Matthew Anson Bridges, take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife to live together in the state of holy matrimony? Will you love, honor, and keep her as a faithful man is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity and adversity, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live?”

“I do,” Matthew said brusquely.

“Do you, Amanda Soames, take this man as your lawfully wedded husband to live together in the state of holy matrimony? Will you love, honor, and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity and adversity, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto him as long as you both shall live?”

Amanda swallowed. She looked at her father, and she nodded, and then she said, “Yes, I do.”

“For as you both have consented in wedlock,” her father said, “and have acknowledged it before this company, I do by virtue of the authority invested in me by the church and the laws of this state now pronounce you husband and wife. And may God bless your union.”

He was lifting the veil. His hands moved so gently, so tenderly on the veil. She felt her face uncovered, she tilted her face, there were tears in her eyes, and then his lips met hers, and he kissed her softly and lightly and moved his mouth back and whispered, “I love you, Amanda,” and she suddenly grasped him to her, holding him tight, and heard the organ music, and felt happiness, happiness, and took his arm, and, smiling at her sister and her mother and her niece, holding tightly to her husband’s arm, walked up the aisle to the back of the church where sunlight streamed through the open doors.

David Regan came back to Talmadge, Connecticut, on a warm spring day in 1947. He was twenty-two years old, but he knew he looked more like thirty. His image in the reflecting windows on the small station platform did not startle him. He could remember once, at Camp Elliott, seeing his face suddenly in the mirror one morning as he was shaving before quarters for muster. He had almost glanced over his shoulder to see who was standing behind him until he realized he was looking at himself. He had leaned closer to the mirror, his eyes wide, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest. And then touched his own face exploringly, like a blind man feeling a statue. And then turned away.

He took a cigarette from the pocket of his jumper now, conscious of the ruptured-duck symbol sewn above the pocket, conscious of the way his hand shook as he lighted the cigarette.

“Help you with your bag, sir?” a voice beside him said.

He shook out the match and turned. One of the Talmadge cab drivers was reaching for his suitcase.

“Leave it alone!” David said sharply. “I don’t need any help.”

“Thought you might want a taxi.”

“I’m walking,” he said.

He picked up his suitcase and started down the main street. The town did not seem to have changed very much. There had been a war in Europe and a war in. the Pacific, and they had dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese towns and rewritten the history of the world, but Talmadge wrapped itself in springtime and looked exactly the same, the spires of the university in the distance, the sleepy look of the main street, the women in slacks, the shopping carts. Places never change, he thought. Only people do.

He tried to feel something as he walked down the street. He tried to remember a boyhood here, tried to remember buying comic books in Hurley’s, Batman and Superman , tried to remember the town huddled against winter snow, Jack Armstrong on the radio each afternoon, The Shadow every Sunday at five-thirty, fishing at the lake, the lake, ah the lake. His thoughts turned off suddenly.

If only he could feel something.

He had thought of this moment for half his lifetime, it seemed. He had spent his youth thinking of this moment, the time when he could return to Talmadge and breathe deeply of free air, walk down the main street of his home town without that P on his back and on his trousers, P for prisoner, the navy labeled everything. You wore your rating on your sleeve and your rank on your collar, and that P for prisoner branded into the flesh on your back and into the soft gray cushion of your mind, it’s over, forget it. Forget it. But he could feel nothing.