Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

Meredith Burke nodded. “I wouldn’t try hitting me, son,” he said. “I would knock you flat on your behind.”

“That’s happened to me before, too,” David said. “But it wouldn’t stop me.”

“Maybe you’re not such a cold fish. Whose idea was this meeting?”

“Gillian’s.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are we supposed to discuss? You’re not asking for my permission to marry her, that’s for sure.”

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“Would it matter if I said you couldn’t marry her?”

“No, sir, it wouldn’t.”

“Then what’s the purpose of this meeting?” He shook his head. “Why’d you agree to it?”

“Because Gillian asked me.”

“Oh, I see. You do whatever she asks you to, huh?”

“I love her,” David said. “I don’t think you know how much.”

“Maybe I do,” Meredith answered. “Does it embarrass you to talk about love?”

“A little.”

“Don’t let it. Drink your coffee. How much money do you earn?”

“Sixty-five dollars a week.”

“That’s not very much.”

“No, sir, it isn’t.”

“I’m very fond of that girl,” Meredith said.

“So am I.”

“She’s my favorite. My other’s in California, you know. I doubt if she’s ever coming back. Don’t hurt that girl, Mr. Regan.”

“I won’t.”

“Women can be hurt. And women can be used. Don’t hurt her, and don’t use her. She’s my daughter, and I’m very fond of her.”

“Does it embarrass you to talk about love?” David asked.

Meredith smiled. “I do love her,” he said gently.

“I thought maybe you did,” David answered, returning the smile. “I had the suspicion.”

“I’ve thought of this day. When she’d bring around the man she’d chosen. I thought of it, Mr. Regan. Even when she was a little girl, and damn pretty she was then too. I thought of it.” He paused. “I guess I don’t like you. But I guess I wouldn’t have liked the mayor of Dublin if my daughter brought him to me and told me she loved him.”

“I guess I don’t like you, either,” David said. “But that has nothing to do with how I feel about Gillian.”

“You know, you may be a big damn bull artist, for all I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, you’d just better not be. I don’t like you now, but I’d like you even less if you were handing my daughter a line.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yes, and don’t go getting her pregnant. I hope you can understand that, too.”

“What are you getting angry about?” David asked suddenly.

“Because, to tell you the truth, I can’t get used to the idea of your sleeping with her, that’s what. I feel like busting you right in the mouth, Mr. Regan. That’s what. Goddamn it, it annoys the hell out of me.”

“Well, calm down. I don’t think Gillian would want us to argue.”

“What the hell does she want? That’s what I’d like to know. Why’d she bring us together?”

“Maybe she thinks it’s time I married her.”

“Well then, maybe it is.”

“She knows I’m going to marry her. I told her that the day we met.”

“That was almost a year ago, sonny. When are you going to get moving?”

David shook his head. “I’m not ready for marriage yet.”

“Then you’ll never be ready. If you’ve got to think it over, you’ll never be ready. And if you’ve got to think it over, I’m not even sure you love her.”

“ I’m the one who’s got to be sure, Mr. Burke. Not you.”

“You seem a lot older than twenty-four.”

“I am a lot older.”

“So’s Gillian.” He looked at David a moment. “Maybe it’s a good match. Who the hell knows?”

“Does anyone ever know?”

“Don’t get smart with your platitudes. Are we finished with our lunch?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t hurt her, Mr. Regan. If you do, I’ll come looking for you.”

That night, she asked David how the lunch had gone.

“Terrible,” he said. “He didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him. Why’d you have us meet, Gillian?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and perhaps she really didn’t.

Perhaps she only wanted to remind David that sooner or later the Hamelin townsfolk would have to pay the man with the pipe. Sooner or later, David would have to take her to the altar and swear the sacred vows, sooner or later he would have to do that if he really wanted to keep her. Or perhaps marriage hadn’t figured in the meeting at all. Perhaps all she’d wanted was to prove to her father, prove to Meredith Burke with his young blond bookkeeper, that she, Gillian Burke, was also capable of having an affair.

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

They began the treatment the moment they received the signed permission from Priscilla. They gave Penny three electric shocks a week for a period of five weeks, and then began speeding up the frequency of treatment. For the next three weeks, Penny’s brain was invaded by electricity once every day. They would strap her legs and her arms to the long flat table while she kicked and gouged, trying to escape the machine behind her, hating it from the very first, hating it even before the first shock struck her, even before the blinding orange flash suddenly streaked behind her eyeballs, even before the sound shrieked into her head, hating the look of the machine itself, the sentient silence of the machine, the ominous machine, the hateful wired machine! Now she knew when they were taking her to the machine that ate her brain with fire. She could smell them as they came down the hall for her, dirty bastards come to take her to the eating machine, she would shout at them and roll her eyes in her head to frighten them away, but they would carry her down the hall, down the sliding sloping hall to the wire machine, strap her down, tie her to the slab, she would twist her head and bite and then sense the hum, that awful hum, know it before it came, feel the orange explosion and the crackling spitting sound inside her head, her hands clenching rigidly, her back arching, blackness.

Limp, unconscious, sweating profusely, she would be carried back to the ward and they would wait for her to regain consciousness, wait for a sign that something was happening, something was penetrating the shell. But she did not respond. So they wrote to Priscilla again and asked this time for permission to begin insulin-shock treatment. “It may help her,” they said, and Priscilla signed another form.

If Penny had hated the ECT, she hated the insulin shocks and the induced comas even more. She knew about the needle. They had done the needle before. They had done the needle to her when she first came here, had stabbed her day and night with the needle, and now there was a needle again, but this time it was an exploding needle, it rocketed into her skull and exploded there in dirty black filth, her eyes would bulge out of her head, she would scream in the blackness, they were trying to make her black, they were trying to explode her brain, they were trying to hit her with a hammer, they were trying to knock her head off with a hammer, five days a week they came with the needle, six days a week, hammer, hammer at her brain, blackness, forty times, forty-five, fifty, and then they stopped. The bastards stopped.

I am claws, I am claws, I am claws!

The doctors were already beginning to think of her as a Back Ward Patient.

The period of mourning was almost over.

The libertine days of World War II, the V-girls and the riveters, the tight sweaters and the low-cut blouses, the short skirts and the exposed knees, the what-the-hell attitude of a generation raised for the preparation and the waging of war, the one-night stands, the shoddy false stateside heroics and the unglorified real heroism overseas, the whole frantic pulse of a nation that had followed the war news as it would the results of a baseball game or a horse race, the entire wacky and unpredictable everyday living that was the United States of America during the war years, all this free and easy living, all this dropping of moral standards in the face of something bigger than both of us, baby, a goddamn war, all this sudden kissing and spontaneous mating had reached its culmination on V-J Day and then had immediately produced a feeling of guilt in a country as basically Puritan as Cotton Mather.