Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The university’s position was strengthened by the commuter attitude. The thing the commuters all loved about Talmadge was its woodsy, rural, dreamlike quality. Any industry introduced into the town would necessitate living facilities for the incoming workers. The moment the town allowed a factory to go up, the commuters were sure the housing developers would come panting in hotly with plans for tract upon tract of identical homes. No, sir, the people of Talmadge did not want to turn this carefully concocted dream into another Long Island housing slum. The zoning regulations prohibited the building of any private dwelling on less than three acres of land, and the going price for Talmadge property in 1952 was three thousand dollars an acre. This meant that a man needed nine thousand dollars before he could even think of breaking ground, and not many men — even in those days of postwar prosperity — had that kind of money to strew around the countryside. With zoning regulations against industry, with zoning regulations that prohibited building except by the rich or the near-rich, Talmadge seemed fairly well protected from invasion.

Julia Regan, the townsfolk estimated, was sitting pretty with her two hundred acres. From what they could figure, the land had probably cost Arthur Regan’s father something like fifty dollars an acre when he’d bought it in 1904. The economic spiral was continuing upward, they figured, and they could visualize a day not too far off when Talmadge land would be bringing anywhere from four to six thousand dollars an acre. A little arithmetic told them that Julia could net a cool six hundred thousand dollars if she decided to sell everything she owned right then and there, and six hundred thousand dollars, they further estimated, was just a little more than half a million dollars, and that was not strawberries. They could also imagine a day when the developers would finally invade Talmadge en masse, with or without industry. Most of the land closer to New York had already yielded to the bulldozers, and Talmadge had the added attraction of being midway between New York and New Haven. With a wild stretch of the imagination it could be called a distant suburb of either. If the developers were finally allowed to bring their housing tracts to Talmadge, there was no telling how much real estate would eventually be worth. Julia, the townsfolk estimated, was playing a shrewdly calculating waiting game with her two hundred acres. She might be dead and gone long before Talmadge ever admitted developers, but her son David would reap a huge profit whichever way the wind blew.

Their opinion of Julia’s business acumen was strongly bolstered by her choice of an attorney. Elliot Tulley was perhaps the shrewdest lawyer in Talmadge, the man who had defended the gun factory against the university’s violation-of-private-schooling-zone case, and won. He was outspoken about zoning regulations and openly stated wherever he could find an audience that “progress could not be legislated against.” Most people thought he was a cantankerous windbag, and most people thought Julia’s periodic visits to his office were concerned with her Talmadge real-estate holdings. Knowing Tulley’s stand on zoning, knowing he had already successfully defended one so-called zoning violation, tying this in with Julia’s standoffish attitude toward the town, assuming Julia had no real love for Talmadge or its woodsy, rural aspirations, they automatically concluded that she and Tulley were cooking up a scheme that would allow the great unwashed to descend upon Talmadge in unimaginable hordes. Two hundred acres were two hundred acres, and a widow who lived alone certainly didn’t need more than that big old house and maybe four or five acres to roam around in. So why else was she hanging onto the land, except in hope of a bigger profit? Why else did she go up to see Tulley once a month like clockwork?

Once a month, the black roadster would pull up in front of Tulley’s office, and the door on the driver’s side would open, and Julia would step out gracefully and close the door behind her. She would walk purposefully toward the steps leading to the upstairs office and then climb them, skirt riding a little, good calves and trim ankles showing, damned if that woman ever showed a sign of age! A half hour later, she would come down, enter her car, and drive off again.

The townspeople knew she discussed zoning on those monthly visits. They could imagine her and Tulley leaning over a Talmadge map and counting and recounting those two hundred acres, dividing them and subdividing them into builders’ plots, cackling as they anticipated the huge profit.

The townspeople, of course, did not know that Julia Regan was a woman living almost entirely in the past. They knew she had once been thirty-five years old and had gone abroad with her sister Millicent. They knew she had been to France and Switzerland and Italy. They did not know that day by day Julia lived and relived a time that had begun for her in August of 1938.

She and Millie ate brook trout amandine in Interlaken.

They sat outdoors and the evening was delightfully cool. Millie was huddled inside a hand-woven shawl she had purchased at one of the local shops. Julia wore a sweater over her blouse, her long brown hair trailing over her shoulders. The Jungfrau dominated the town. Wherever you walked, you could see the mountain in the distance, pristine and white, jutting into the sky. Looking at it, Julia understood why men went on climbing expeditions. The streams of Interlaken were incredibly blue and green, pellucid, as if they had been concocted on an artist’s palette and allowed to run wetly over a pad. The town felt enclosed and tight, and they sat outdoors in front of the sleepy hotel and ate trout caught that day in mountain streams, pan-broiled, crisp and brown on the outside, flaking off white on the fork, crumbling in the mouth. Two German officers were sitting at a table behind them. They talked in guttural whispers, laughing occasionally. Julia was sure they were talking about her and Millie, but she ate her fish and drank her beer in seeming disregard, and afterward asked the headwaiter if she might have the thick brown bottle to take home to her son.

They talked mostly about their impending drive through the Alps to Italy. It had been Millie’s idea to rent a car in Paris, an idea Julia strenuously opposed. Her sister was going abroad on her doctor’s orders, and Julia’s concept of the trip had been an air flight to Rome and then a train ride east to Aquila, where Millie would find the sunshine and mountain air she needed.

“I’ll probably come to Europe only once in my entire life,” Millie had said. “I won’t let you wrap me up like an invalid and ship me through the continent in a baggage car.”

“That’s not the point, Millie.”

“The point is we’re here, and I’m still alive, thank God, and I’d like to see a little of France and Switzerland and Italy before I end up on a porch in the sun. We’ll drive to Italy, Julia. That’s the way we’ll do it.”

Julia had dropped the argument. Millie was her older sister, and she’d never been able to win an argument with her, even when they were children. Besides, she had learned that spinsters were as stubborn as anything God had ever devised, and her sister was no exception. If Millie keeled over dead on the ride to Italy, even the death would bring pleasure if it was the result of an independently arrived-at conclusion. So Julia had stopped trying to convince her, and they had remained in Paris for four days, and rented a car from a French agency, and the matter had been settled. Or, at least, Julia thought it had been settled.

Now, sitting in midsummer silence at an outdoor restaurant in the cool shadow of the virgin mountain, Millie began to have qualms about the drive. “These are the Alps, you know,” she said. “These aren’t the Catskills, Julia. I’ve always been afraid of high places, and there’s nothing higher than the Alps, is there? I’ve heard the roads are bad, and sometimes slippery, and treacherous. Suppose we get killed up there in the Alps? I don’t care so much for myself, but what about you? With a husband and a child, a mere growing boy, back in Connecticut? Perhaps we should forget driving. Perhaps there’s another way.”