Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The period of mourning was almost over. A nation that nominated to the presidency for the second time Thomas E. Dewey, a man with a mustache , was certainly a nation flirting with the frivolous, a country that could now remember with warm nostalgia a time of sacrifice and common endeavor. The biggest song hit of the day was “Nature Boy,” which proclaimed to the world at large that “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” The big bands were on their way out. Glenn Miller had been killed during the war, and he belonged to the past. The greats of the thirties, Basie and Krupa and Dorsey and Spivak and Goodman, were fading sounds on a new musical scene, which placed the emphasis on vocalists and arranged jazz. The discordant sounds of Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie were as new to the ear as were the slickly bright colors of the automobiles to the eye. A nation without memory needed new sights and new sounds and new heroes. Americans, perhaps unknowingly, were in the midst of a strange renaissance. There were changes in the country, and they seemed evolutionary, but perhaps they were as revolutionary as those that had swept over Russia in 1917.

In the midst of these changes, Amanda Bridges knew a change all her own, physical, spiritual, mental.

There were perhaps two things that occupied most of her waking thoughts before November. These were her sister Penny’s illness and the new house in Talmadge. She would arise each morning with Penny in her mind, and each morning she would write a letter to Sandstone, which Penny never answered. And then she would set about doing the thousands of things that any new house, even when it was an old house, needed done. In November, she felt completely changed, almost as if she had been reborn, almost as if a new person had emerged from the office with its clapboard shingles, a new woman. She felt rounder and softer and more female and curiously more sexy, but also a little more shy, and contradictorily a little more noticeable, but productive and real, and closer to God, and closer to Matthew, and closer to the new house and the town of Talmadge, the roots of Talmadge, a little awkward, a little more cautious, a little more recklessly flirtatious. The news did all these things to Amanda so that she was rendered completely unaware of the bigger changes happening around her, she was concerned only with the miracle of change in herself.

In November of 1948, Amanda discovered she was pregnant.

Matthew thought it was incredible.

He was not so much pleased by the news as he was astounded. He knew, of course, that there were certain natural functions that, if not carefully supervised, could very easily lead to this sort of thing, but it was not the simplicity of Amanda’s conception that amazed him. It was, rather, the fact that someone like his wife could suddenly become a potential mother. He didn’t know if he enjoyed thinking of her as a mother. He didn’t even know if he enjoyed thinking of her as a wife. Birth and motherhood implied mysteries he could never hope to fathom. He had never enjoyed suspense stories, and he felt, that he was mysterious enough for both of them and certainly didn’t need anyone shuffling around the house with the great secret of the universe in her belly. There was one secret in the old Talmadge house already, and one secret was enough.

The secret gave him immeasurable pleasure. It was a secret he had never divulged to Amanda. No matter what he shared with her, no matter how close he felt to her, the nights they exchanged kisses and dreams, the days when their marriage fell into the expected hiatus of the ordinary and they shared something less than passion but somehow more intimate, he would never tell Amanda what had almost happened to her on Christmas Eve five years ago. He knew he would never tell her this, and he realized their relationship was built on the solid foundation of — not a lie, certainly not a lie — but a truth withheld. Nor was he being facetious. He felt this withheld truth was a solid foundation. This was not specious reasoning, so far as Matthew was concerned. He felt that marriage was a totally illogical invention, anyway, and he thought it was far more honest to build a marriage around a withheld truth than it was to build it around anything like faith or trust, which were lies in themselves.

He had learned early in life that there were the weak and the strong, the poverty-stricken and the rich, the outsiders and the insiders, the loved and the unloved, the chaste and the unchaste, all excellent paperback titles, he surmised, but all nonetheless direct opposites in a world of conflict and contrast. He had carried this a step further and theorized that every human relationship was based upon a principle of greater or lesser possession or involvement. One party had more money, or loved more, or hated more, or was more ambitious or more cruel or more passionate than the party who was his opposite number. And the other person, by simple inversion, did all these things, or was all these things, or owned all these things, to a lesser extent, the More-or-Less Principle of Matthew Anson Bridges. The remarkable thing about his theory was that it could be applied to a personal relationship as well as a business relationship, and it worked exceptionally well when applied to the institution known as marriage.

On his wedding night, Matthew learned that Amanda loved him more than he loved her. He also learned that he was more passionate, more skilled, and infinitely more interested in sex than was his new bride. He felt it was a good thing that she loved him more because he could not visualize the reverse situation, a situation that could make life intolerable for the person on the short end of the stick. Oh, he loved her, all right. He loved her the way any red-blooded boy would love a girl who was beautiful and desirable and witty and talented and provocative. He certainly loved her. He loved her even after he learned that her early-morning beauty was sometimes a bit faded, and her desirability was simply an accident of the flesh, and her wit was sometimes hopelessly rural, and her talent sometimes included the playing of Mozart, Mozart, Mozart all damn day long, and her provocation was all too often unconscious and led absolutely nowhere; he loved her. What the hell, these were two people living together, and she probably didn’t like the way he tied his pajama bottoms or brushed his teeth. There were bound to be little frictions that would arise when two separate and distinct personalities moved into the same house and began sharing the same bathroom. He expected this, and was not surprised by it. There certainly was nothing about Amanda that would send him running into the streets shrieking for a divorce, and he did love her. But he was very happy that she loved him more than he loved her.

He was also happy about his secret. The secret gave him strength somehow. He never alluded to it, never by the slightest hint of word or expression gave any clue to its existence. But it was there inside him, and he often thought of that Christmas Eve, and how he had saved Amanda on the big brass bed, and the secret and his memories of the secret always made him smile a little. He would look at Amanda his wife, a little naïve, a little unknowing, his beautiful Amanda, and smile. Her innocence sometimes amazed him. He often wished he could have at every jury trial four witnesses for the defense who looked like Amanda and talked like Amanda. He would have her sit in the witness chair and answer questions in her unaffected, honest, Midwestern voice, smiling slightly perhaps, her blue eyes wide, her long blond hair framing an angelic face. He would not coach her beforehand, but he knew she would unconsciously cross her legs at some point during the questioning, and every man on the jury would desire her and then feel an enormous sense of embarrassment and guilt for his lecherous notions. Amanda would continue answering the questions sweetly, totally unaware of the conflict she was causing. But they would believe her if she told them the earth was flat. He was certainly glad she loved him more than he loved her.