Эд Макбейн: Mothers and Daughters

Snow.

She heard the shovels scraping on the campus walks when it was still dark, and she sat bolt upright in bed and thought Snow! and then almost called out in excitement to the bed across the dormitory room until she remembered Diane had changed rooms and the bed was empty. The word snow rushed into her mind again, and she threw back the covers and rushed to the window. The floor was cold. She hopped from foot to slipperless foot as she wiped the window clear of condensation and peered out over the campus. Snow, and it was still falling, whispering, hushed. Snow, and the university lights were almost obscured in a dizzy swirl of white. A sudden gladness clutched at her heart, squeezing an unconscious grin onto her face.

“Oh, good, it’s snowing!” she said aloud, and she ran back to her bed and pulled the quilt to her chin and crossed her arms over her breasts and lay in the darkness smiling, thinking of Minnesota and the woods, and walking behind her father and her sister when they went out to cut down the tree for Christmas, the air so cold you could break it off and hear it tinkle in your fist, the snow thick and silent underfoot except for the steady squeaking crunch of her father’s boots. She lay in bed with the smile on her face, and she could not sleep. She thought of the way the snow would bank high against the kitchen door behind the rectory, and the tight snug snowed-in feeling of the house at evening prayers, the fire blazing high in the stone fireplace, the smell of pitch, the crackling spit of new wood; she could not sleep. Dawn broke against her window in silent grayness, sunlessly.

She got out of bed wide awake and quickly took off her pajamas.

“Whooo!” she said. “Whooo!” She put on her underclothing quickly, the cold bringing out goose bumps all over her body. She put on a skirt and her thickest sweater, and then she went down the hall to wash and brush her teeth. The dormitory was still. She was the only person alive in the entire world.

The campus was a line drawing that November day, black and white, everything so sharp and so clear. She felt she could see for miles, beyond the low brick wall hemming in the university grounds, and into the town of Talmadge itself, and beyond that into all Connecticut and New England, and to exotic places over the sea; her visibility was limitless that day. The snow lay untouched on the open campus fields and banked high on the sides of each walk. It seemed totally flat and one-dimensional, artificial. The bare trees behind it were black in silhouette against the gray sky. There was no color that day. It was odd. Even the red brick of some of the buildings seemed colorless.

She stopped on the low flat steps of the dorm and scanned the grounds, her eyes traveling in a slow circle, and then she pulled off one of her red mittens and scooped up a handful of snow. She held it in her palm until her hand stung, and then she bit into it, smiled, and tossed the remainder of the snow into the air. She wiped her hand on her coat and started out across the campus, walking rapidly, her hand tingling from the snow.

She passed the three chapels guiltily — well, she would say her morning prayers while she practiced — and then went on past the old campus on Fieldston Street, and then turned abruptly right onto Townsend and past the Townsend Memorial Library and the Town-send Law Buildings, each building topped with a wig of snow so that it resembled a British barrister begging a point of order. She was anxious to get at one of the pianos in the rehearsal rooms. She was hungry, but she could get a cup of coffee from the machine in the basement of Ardaecker. She could not bear the bustle of the student cafeteria this morning, not this glorious morning when she was feeling so wonderfully alive.

I love it here, she thought, but I do miss home, but I love it here, and again she marveled at the miracle of being here at all. She could remember first receiving the Talmadge catalogue, and the frightening entrance requirements for the School of Music and the major in composition. Did she know modal counterpoint? Could she harmonize chorale melodies in the style of Bach? Apprehensively, she had read through the list of topics to be covered in the examinations: the rudiments of music, the perception of rhythm and pitch, modulation, non-chordal notes, altered chords, two- and three-part fugue writing, three-part motets.

She had looked up at her father suddenly and said, “This is impossible! They’re out of their minds!” and then immediately buried her nose in the catalogue again.

There would be keyboard tests in reading scores of two to four staves in different clefs (including alto and tenor clefs), tests in transposition, in harmonizing figured and unfigured parts, an oral test on the theory of music. And, to cap it all, she was required to submit at least four original compositions, one of which had to be polyphonic in character, “such compositions to be delivered to the Talmadge School of Music not later than March 1, 1941.”

“They’re out of their minds!” she had said again.

And yet she had done it, and here she was, starting her third semester, and it seemed she had been here forever. Had she really known anything at all about music before she entered Talmadge? How in the world had she ever passed the entrance exams? A miracle, that was all. The power of prayer. She drew in a deep breath and felt the cold air hammering her body to life again. She smiled suddenly. There was a tinge of expectation to the day, somehow, as if something were going to happen — oh, she just wished it would, just around the turn of the walk; still she knew nothing would happen, but wouldn’t it be great if something did? But she knew nothing would.

And then she heard footsteps on the walk ahead of her, and for an instant her heart stopped, and she caught her breath. She felt as if she had made a pact with the devil. Now I’ve done it, she thought, and stopped stock-still, waiting for God-knew-what blinding explosion of evil.

She almost laughed aloud when Morton Yardley came into view around the bend.

“Morton!” she said, relieved. Her voice rang on the campus stillness, startling him. He stopped on the path and peered out from under the hood of his Mackinaw, billows of vapor steaming from within the cowl.

“Oh, hullo, Amanda,” he said.

She smiled. “Hello, Morton.”

“It’s too cold,” Morton said.

She liked Morton. He was one of the few boys on campus she could talk to. She had first met him in her class on Bach’s Organ Compositions. He was a divinity student taking the course as an elective, and really a pretty fair organist, not as good as her father, of course, but with a good keyboard sense nonetheless. He had been puzzled by the tonality of one of the preludes, and she’d stayed after class explaining it to him, liking him instantly even though there was an air of displacement about him, as if he had already taken a personal vow of poverty and chastity. She had hardly ever seen him without his hooded Mackinaw. He wore it well into the spring, always with the hood up, as though he had secretly joined a monastic order ages ago and was only going through the motions of an uncloistered life. He always made her smile. He had a round cherub’s face, and a well-padded paunch, and guileless blue eyes, and a very high voice, the physical equipment of a jolly Friar Tuck. And yet he was an oddly solemn and detached boy, a thin boy wearing a fat boy’s body, a boy who walked with the curiously sedate and pensive motion of an old man talking to pigeons in the park. Still, he made her smile.