Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The question was always the same — “Are you going out tonight?” — as if now that she had found a father, she could not bear letting him out of her sight.

And the answer was invariably the same, too — “No!” — because now that Kate had come to live with them, Matthew had no desire at all to socialize. The child’s presence, together with Amanda’s ever-expanding universe, provided a ready excuse for ducking Talmadge’s weekend get-togethers, which Matthew had never liked, anyway. Talmadge parties, to Matthew, were simply an extension of the fantasy land these well-meaning New Yorkers had created. He hated to attend them, and he hated to give them, and so he was grateful to Kate for her arrival because she introduced them to a Talmadge disease known simply as The Sitter Problem.

“We shouldn’t leave her with a sitter,” he said to Amanda. “The house is still strange to her.”

“You just don’t like parties, that’s all,” Amanda said knowingly.

“What gives you that idea?”

“You never dance with any of the women.”

“I dance with you,” Matthew said.

“Oh, and a lot of fun that must be for you right now. Look at me. I’m mountainous.”

He put his hands on her belly. “You’re lovely,” he said.

“Some of the women in Talmadge are very attractive, Matthew.”

“Are they?”

“Yes, and I’m just a pregnant old sow.”

“A pregnant young sow.”

“Young, excuse me,” Amanda said, smiling. “They are attractive, admit it. Very chic, and very—”

“Yes, they’re attractive. But you’re beautiful. And besides, I happen to love you.”

But not as much as she loved him.

She watched his growing attachment to the child, and wondered if she were jealous. She found herself hoping the baby would be a boy. She knew that no red-faced wrinkled little girl could possibly hope to compete with her blond and beautiful niece. Even the word “niece” worried her. She automatically thought of Kate as her sister’s child — but she knew that Matthew had already begun to think of her as his own daughter.

On a day early in June, the picture changed somewhat.

She had been sitting out in the sun, her eyes closed, her hands folded over her belly, when she suddenly realized the yard was very still. She sat up and called, “Kate!” and received no answer. Alarmed, she pushed herself laboriously out of the chair, waddled across the lawn, and went into the house. The house was still. She looked in the kitchen and the dining room and the living room, but Kate was nowhere on the ground floor. She heard the sound of Kate’s voice upstairs then, and she smiled to herself, took hold of the banister, and tiptoed up the steps and down the corridor to where the door of the master bedroom stood ajar.

Kate was standing in front of the full-length mirror. She was wearing a pair of Amanda’s high-heeled pumps and one of Amanda’s floppy hats. She stood with one hand on her hip and smiled at her reflection in the mirror.

“You’re so pretty, Amanda,” she said to the glass. “You’re so pretty, Mommy.”

Amanda backed away from the door silently.

She had suddenly remembered a day in the upstairs bedroom of the house in Otter Falls when a nine-year-old girl named Amanda had put on a dress and shoes belonging to a woman named Priscilla Soames.

The television program originated from a loft on West Sixty-eighth Street, just off Central Park West. The building was set among several apartment houses, and it had almost no windows in its brick face. Walking up the quiet residential street, one suddenly came upon the featureless brick wall with its six windows in a vertical line illuminating the stair well, and with two metal fire doors on the street level set some twenty-five feet apart. The building looked menacing, but all they were doing inside was putting on a television show.

The show was a popular item called Memos , which Curt Sonderman as producer had built around a genial raconteur and quasi-comic named Sam Martin. Martin was one of the forerunners of a school of television performers whose stock in trade was a lack of talent, a bumbling sort of oafish man who looked like the man next door and dressed like the man next door and even talked like him. In fact, looking at Sam Martin, the man next door had the distinct impression that this was exactly the way he would behave if someone suddenly dragged him into a television studio and told him to start talking. Martin said whatever came into his mind whenever it came into his mind. His opinions were based on a retentive memory for the trivia of life; his mind was an attic cluttered with unimportant knowledge. He was like the man who wore two wrist watches, one set with New York time, the other set with London time. When asked why he wore the second watch, he replied, “In case anyone wants to know what time it is in London.” Sam Martin could not, perhaps, tell you what time it was in London, but he could tell you who pitched for the Red Sox in 1939, which movie won the Academy Award in 1932, how many eggs to use in a pineapple upside-down cake, the best way to repair a hole in a screen, and how to remove ticks from golden retrievers. He could also tell a dirty joke without offending the ladies, and he could describe the latest fashion trends without disgusting the men. He was good-looking enough to provide a low-key sex appeal for the women — and yet not handsome enough to provide any real competition for the man in the house. He could not sing, and he could not dance, and he had a terrible speaking voice, and a plebeian sense of humor; he was, in short, untalented. But television in those early days was breeding a new race of untalented supermen who would pyramid their very lack of talent into a talent that appealed to those anxious viewers out there, those dial-happy fickle folk.

In a time when television dramas were trying their best to convince the man in the street that it was perfectly all right, in fact decent and honorable and praiseworthy, to be a slob, Sam Martin came on the air as visual proof of the theory. The television of that day was concerned primarily with the number of cockroaches in the kitchen sink. A new art school was being hammered into existence in the small inadequate studios scattered throughout the city’s more undesirable slums, the premise of the school being that no drama was real drama unless it dealt with small people, a premise Aristotle might have challenged had he been alive and involved in the medium. These small people fought to find themselves on the small screen while they simultaneously stepped on small cockroaches every time they snapped on the kitchen light. For a while there, some of the more perceptive viewers began wishing the cockroaches would march through Georgia to the sea, taking all the damn small people with them. It got a little boring, week after week, watching shows that posed such earth-shaking problems as whether or not a Borscht Belt summer romance would survive the winter, or whether a man who rescued a rich man’s son from a sewer would have his life ruined by this act of heroism, or whether a man who found himself unemployed in his fiftieth year could find a new job before the roaches carried him off. But the small people triumphed. Viewers began talking about “ears for dialogue” and “clinical verity” and “the minutiae of life” and “neorealistic objectivity” and “representational integrity,” and into this era of the contemplation of the involuting curves of one’s own navel came Sam Martin with his midday drivel, his storehouse of worthless observations, his rumpled suit, his featureless face. The viewers could look at him and know with certainty that he, too, was a man plagued by cockroaches.

David Regan worked for the sponsors who employed Sam Martin.