Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The act of giving birth, the act of pushing that small body out of her own, was somehow disconnected from the concept of giving birth, so that whereas everyone in the delivery room — the doctor, the nurses, the anesthetist, Amanda herself — was collected there to bring a life into the world, they were all only concerned with the mechanics of producing the child, their only concern was with the work, the labor of giving birth, and the act itself was completely alien to the concept. The lights over the table hurt her eyes. The anesthetic mask would be placed on her face and then removed, so that she was in a constant state of near-unconsciousness, and into the swimming cloudlike miasma of her brain she could hear Dr. Kohnblatt saying, “Bear down now, Amanda,” and she strained and pushed and she was afraid she would soil herself, he seemed to read her mind, he said, “Don’t worry about it, push!” and she pushed and the mask came down on her face again, her mind swam, she felt herself reeling, “Push!” Consciousness flowed back to her, she tightened her bowels and her vagina and felt something, felt something move and was suddenly tense, “Scalpel,” she pushed again, “No, wait, Amanda,” he said, “there, just a little, nurse, she doesn’t need more than that, you’re doing fine, Amanda, there we are, sponge, now push, Amanda.” She could feel the baby coming out. She could feel it wedged inside her and getting the baby out became a challenge, became something they had to accomplish together, she pushed and felt the baby move, “Good, Amanda,” she pushed again, “Oh damn!” she said, “oh damn, damn, damn it!” and she heard Kohnblatt laugh and she started to say, What are you laughing at, do you want to try this? and Kohnblatt said, “You’re doing a marvelous job, Amanda, we’ve almost got it, push as hard as you can, here we go, Amanda, come on, come on,” she took a deep breath and she gritted her teeth and she could feel the sweat standing out on her face and the baby wedged solidly in her crotch, she shoved, she tightened every muscle she owned, she pushed, and suddenly, suddenly, oh suddenly! she felt a sudden shock of exultation, she felt the baby moving out of her, felt herself trembling as it seemed to slide suddenly from within her, oh, felt a wave of excitement surging through her body, free and out, snapping into her brain, “Did I do it?” she asked excitedly, “Yes, you did it, that was it, Amanda!” she felt suddenly proud and joyful, felt a marvelous soaring ecstasy, a jubilance she had never known before in her life.

The mask descended on her face, and she took a deep breath, smiling, grinning. “I did it,” she murmured, and heard the baby’s cry.

When she opened her eyes, the baby was on her breast, lying with its legs on her belly. She did not move to touch it. She looked down at it peacefully and thankfully and then closed her eyes again.

“It’s a fine healthy boy,” Dr. Kohnblatt said.

The car Julia Regan bought in 1952 was an Alfa Romeo roadster.

Its appearance on the streets and roads of Talmadge, Connecticut caused no little comment. The town, indeed the nation, had not yet succumbed to the exotic siren call of the foreign car. They had been fascinated by the miniature charm of some of the foreign imports, had indulged their caprice to the extent of purchasing automobiles that seemed both novel and economical, but the indulgence had not yet become a trend, the fascination had not yet become a craze. The car Julia purchased startled the citizens of the town because it was the first such to appear in Talmadge and because it appeared in a burst of low-slung black elegance with red leather upholstery and white-wall tires and a Pinin Farina front end seemingly composed of peering head lamps and a smirking radiator grille. Julia Regan was forty-eight years old, and something Puritan in the lifeblood of the townsfolk rebelled at the concept of her driving such a flashy automobile.

At the same time, they were forced to admit that Julia’s beauty had miraculously withstood the ravages of time, and that she managed to bring an added grace to the clean, wide-canopied, prancing good looks of the automobile. Oh yes, she had thickened a bit about the waist, and her throat and neck were not as taut as they once had been, and the brown hair braided into a bun at the back of her head showed strands of gray here and there. But somehow, Julia was managing to avoid the anonymous abyss of middle age. They would have said she was aging gracefully if there were any question of her aging at all; but Julia seemed to have found a constant level somewhere between maturity and old age, and she clung to that unchangingly, effortlessly. There would, they knew, be no in-between years for Julia Regan, no subtle evolution from summer to autumn to winter. They would continue to see her for a long time as youthful, energetic, beautiful. And then one day they would raise their eyes and look at Julia, and she would be old. Suddenly, she would be old. In the meantime, they watched her with a sort of shocked awe, deploring the jazzy sports car but simultaneously respecting and rejoicing in the freedom of spirit that had led to its purchase.

At forty-eight, Julia still moved with graceful femininity. Her voice had deepened a bit, and she spoke rarely and softly, her large brown eyes emphasizing her every word. Her body was neither the ripe ornamental accident of a maiden nor the meticulously structured shell of a matron, but it was a womanly body that resisted every middle-age tendency toward squareness. There was an iron-hard quality to Julia, a stiffness of back, a purposefulness of stride, a thrust of head and chin, which did not invite casual relationships and which provided her with an aura of aloofness. But this was the core of the woman, and not the mold. The mold was soft and rounded. She did not look like a young girl, but neither was she a ridiculously pathetic older woman desperately digging into cosmetics jars for her lost beauty, draping her sagging body with the fripperies of youth. Julia Regan still had good legs and a firm bosom, and she walked with the slightest hint of unconscious suggestiveness, and, as she always had, she still looked desirable and just possibly available and yet totally respectable. The people of the town watched her and wondered about the secret of her youth, and were puzzled by the anachronism. She drove the Italian sports car over the roads of Talmadge with an annoying but fascinating disdain for the opinions of others. And even though her hair was caught securely at the nape of her neck, you could swear it was streaming over her shoulders in the wind.

As far as the people of Talmadge could see, there were only two things that interested Julia Regan. These were her son, David, and the property she had inherited from her late husband, Arthur. Her son was living in New York and, from what they had heard, was doing quite well in television. They always knew when he was coming up to Talmadge for the weekend because Julia seemed more friendly toward everyone just before his arrival. Her son didn’t have much to do with the people of the town, even though he’d grown up with most of the boys, but the town accepted that as the way of the Regans. Besides, with so much Talmadge real estate behind them, neither Julia nor David had to be friendly if they didn’t choose to be.

Julia had inherited two hundred acres of choice Talmadge land when her husband died. In all likelihood, her son David would fall heir to that property one day, and in a town that was as real-estate-oriented as Talmadge, this was a parcel to be reckoned with. There were two constant cries at town board meetings, and these were “Keep the developers out!” and “Stop the sand and gravel operations!” The cries were in perfect accord with the intent of the townspeople. Talmadge had been invented by ivory-tower scholars and discovered by Madison Avenue confectioners. The largest real-estate interest in town, of course, remained the university’s, and this seat of higher learning was not particularly interested in finding itself suddenly surrounded by a lot of belching factories. The gun factory on the far side of town was eyesore enough and stuck in the craw of scholar and commuter alike, but was fortunately close enough to the nearby town of Rattigan to be almost physically divorced from Talmadge itself. Nonetheless, it was a constant reminder of what could happen to the town, and so the zoning restrictions insisted upon by the university interests largely concerned industry, both heavy and light.