Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, Regan,” the guard said. “You know who did the yelling. Now, how about telling me?”

I didn’t answer. The guard kept staring at me, and the tears kept streaming down my face, but I didn’t answer. The guard nodded briefly, and then turned, apparently starting back for his chair in the shade with the walkie-talkie resting on its seat. It was then that Mike shoved me.

He shoved me with all the strength of his arms, and I went pitching forward, and Mike pulled back on his leg so that the chain pulled up tight. I tripped and went falling toward the guard, grabbing at him for balance as I fell, the leg iron holding me. I thought I was going to land on my face, Gillian, I thought I’d smash my face on the rocks. I grabbed at the guard’s clothes, and he swung around with his eyes wide, his right hand sweeping toward the billet, and then he raised the club, and I tried to say “No!” I tried to shout, “No, I’m falling! I’m only...” but he hit me. He hit me once, sharply, on the top of the skull, splitting it wide with his first shot. I was on my knees, clinging to him, when I felt the blood gushing onto my forehead and into my eyes, and I turned and looked at Mike Arretti and I saw him through the blood, standing there and leaning on his hammer with a smile on his face, a smile, Gillian, a smile! The guard hit me again, on the shoulder this time, numbing my right side. I fell over into the dust.

It could have been worse. They could have put me in solitary, they could have left me to rot in that goddamned prison. Or they could have refused even to consider any future parole requests. I didn’t get out that May, Gillian, but actually they were pretty decent about it. I reapplied for release in December, and it was six months after that when they finally let me go. I didn’t leave Camp Elliott until May of 1947. Mike Arretti had cost me a full year.

I saw him in the recreation yard two days before they sent me to Treasure Island for my discharge. He smiled at me, Gillian. The son of a bitch smiled.

The third job David got was in the public library on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. Unlike the other jobs he’d held, he seemed to like this one. He recognized, of course, that it was only a temporary thing, but he felt completely at home in the small room where he worked, the sunlight pouring through the arched window that overlooked Bryant Park, a window surrounded by stone like an ancient cathedral. The books that passed through his hands were sometimes old and yellowed. He received manuscripts faded with time, written in script that was ancient and strange. He handled the books gently and with great respect. Alone in his tower room, he felt an enormous sense of continuity as history passed through his hands on the pages of dusty volumes and manuscripts. The official title of his job was “Accessioner.” One of his duties, among many others, was the marking of all new library acquisitions with the official library seal. Any book, pamphlet, or manuscript that found its way to his desk was instantly numbered on the page after the title page, and again on page 97 if the material ran that long. Gillian promptly dubbed him “The Lord High Accessioner,” and when he’d been at the job for a month and got his first raise, she shopped the stores off Sixth Avenue for a Japanese army medal and a libretto of The Mikado . She tore out page 97 and the one after the title page, and on the flyleaf she wrote:

8/10/48

Banzai!

In commemoration raise, from loving, humble, honorable servant,

On Sunday, they went to Central Park to celebrate. They had lunch at the Tavern on the Green, and then wandered leisurely over the paths, directionless, turning each bend by whim alone. They stopped at Cleopatra’s Needle, where Gillian read the translation of the hieroglyph for the first time, fascinated by it. “Are those lobster claws?” she asked, looking up at the metal figures at the base of the obelisk.

“Crabs, I think,” David said.

“They were probably added later.”

“No, I think they’re part of the original.”

“Do they have crabs in Egypt?”

“They have crabs everywhere . Crabs are one of the oldest forms of animal life.”

“Oh, such a smart-oh,” Gillian said. “What happened? Did you get a book on crustaceans yesterday, huh? Is that what happened, Accessioner?”

They walked west to the Shakespeare garden, where someone had smashed the glass front of the plaque telling why the garden was there. They came upon an old brown house, which seemed to have been transplanted from some Scottish moor. A girl was sitting on the stoop before the locked door, reading a comic book. They stumbled onto the lake suddenly, and Gillian laughed when she saw the hundreds and hundreds of people in rowboats. “I can’t understand it,” she said in mock puzzlement. “Such a nice day, and nobody on the lake rowing.” They took a winding path up from the lake and found an orchid corsage under one of the bushes. Gillian picked it up and held it on the palm of her hand.

“Now thereby lies a tale,” she said. “What do you suppose it was doing under that bush?”

“That’s where its owner was last night,” David said.

“A prom,” Gillian said. “They came here after a prom.”

“No proms in August, Gillian.”

“That’s right. A special occasion of some sort then. A birthday. An anniversary. And they were walking through the park, and they had an argument, and she threw his orchid under the bush.”

“ Ja , go on,” David said in a thick German accent. “Dot’s very goot. Tell me more aboud your assoziations.”

“Your accent is terrible,” Gillian said. “Let’s hang it on a tree.”

“My accent?”

“The flower, David. Come!”

They unwound the wire holding the stem of the flower to its fern and then rewired the orchid to the leafy branch of an elm. The tree stood to the side of the path, the single purple bloom seeming to sprout magically from the end of one of its branches.

“Und now ve obzerve, doktor,” Gillian said.

“And that’s a good accent, huh?”

“No, but I do it with style,” Gillian answered.

They sat on a rock several feet away from the elm tree, trying not to seem interested in the orchid or the people who passed by. Three young men in tight jeans and Italian sweaters were the first to spot the flower. One giggled, sniffed it, shoved at his companions, sniffed it again, and then joined them as they went up the path laughing.

“You know what they thought it was, don’t you?” Gillian asked.

“No. What?”

“The late-blooming faggotry.”

“Here are some more customers,” David said.

Two little girls had stopped to study the flower. They approached it cautiously, standing several feet back from it.

“Be careful,” the first girl said. “It’s one of those stingers. Don’t touch it. It’ll sting you.”

The second girl moved closer to the riotous purple bloom. She peered at its petals and then tentatively stuck out her hand.

“Don’t touch it!” the other girl shouted.

The second girl touched it gingerly, pulled back her hand at once, and said, “Wow!”

“Did it sting you?” the first girl asked as they walked on. “Huh? Did it sting you, Marie?”

They watched the flower for at least twenty minutes. At the end of that time, an old man wearing striped trousers and a derby hat stopped at the tree, discovered the bloom, raised his eyebrows appreciatively, plucked it from the branch, stuck it in his buttonhole, and went jauntily down the path humming.

“Most of them didn’t even notice it,” Gillian said sadly.

“Ah, but that’s life,” David answered.