Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“What are you saying, Dad?”

“I think you know what I’m saying.”

“You’re calling me a bum, right?”

“No, I’m not. But, Liss, have you reenrolled at school, for example?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Have you made any plans at all for the future?”

“Not yet.”

“What kind of work are you doing now, Liss?”

“Baby-sitting. Waitressing. Like that,” she said, and shrugged.

“And when you’re forty?”

“My life-style doesn’t have to change simply because I get older. I don’t need as much as you do, Dad. I don’t need an apartment with a dozen rooms in it...”

“Six, Liss.”

“I don’t need vacations in the Caribbean...”

“You never seemed to complain about them when you were...”

“I don’t need a goddamn fancy sports car... what are you driving these days, Dad? What’s Joanna driving?”

“Is that your quarrel with us? Our life-style?”

“I don’t have any quarrel with you.”

“Then why haven’t you written? Or called?”

“I’ve been busy making my own life. You kicked me out of your life, so now I’m trying to make a life of my own. Is there anything wrong about that?”

“Only the part about kicking you out. Nobody’s done that, Lissie.”

“No. Then what was marrying Joanna?”

“Marrying Joanna was...”

“Was kicking out me and Mom, that’s what it was.”

“No, Lissie.”

“No? Then what’s today? The same thing all over again, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“We come all the way down from Boston to see you, and you go running off to Long Island. Okay, maybe Yom Kippur is important to Joanna...”

“It’s the most important Jewish—”

“When did you get to be Jewish, Dad? The point is, do you have to kick us out into the street? Do you know what checking into a hotel tonight’ll mean for Sparky and me? Do you have any idea what kind of white-black shit we get dumped on us all the time?”

Jamie glanced at the waitress hovering near one of the screens shielding the kitchen.

“Oh, fuck her,” Lissie said, “this is your daughter here.”

“What do you want me to do, Lissie?”

“What time will you be back tonight?”

“Late.”

“So can’t we stay in the apartment while you’re gone? I mean, will that be such a big deal? If we spent another night with you?”

“I’m not sure how Joanna would feel about that,” he said, even though he already knew exactly how Joanna felt about it.

“Well, yeah, Joanna,” Lissie said.

“But I’ll ask her,” he said.

“It would be a big help, Dad,” Lissie said. “You’ve got no idea what we go through, I mean it.”

“Let me ask her,” he said, and covered her hand with his own. “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

She put her hand over his, and suddenly grinned across the table at him. “Do you know what I used to love with all my heart?” she asked.

“What’s that, Lissie?”

“When you used to hang my pictures in the living room. On all my birthdays. Do you remember that, Dad? When you used to hang my pictures?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said, and turned away to signal for the check because he did not want her to see the sudden rush of tears to his eyes.

Joanna was sitting in half-slip and bra at the dressing table, putting on her face, when he came into the bedroom at three that afternoon.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Fine, I think.”

“The talk , I mean, not the lunch.”

“The talk especially,” he said, and went to her and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Well, good, darling,” she said, and smiled at him in the mirror. “Is Sparky back yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“Well, what are we...?” She turned and looked at the clock on the bedside table. “We’ll be leaving in an hour, Jamie.”

“Lissie asked if they could spend the night.”

“What’d you tell her?” Joanna said, and looked up at him.

“That I’d discuss it with you.”

“The answer is no.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like the idea.”

“If you didn’t mind the idea of them sleeping together in the guest room last night...”

“Who says I didn’t mind the idea?”

“Joanna, she’s nineteen years old. That’s old enough to be treated like a grownup. When you were nineteen...”

“When I was nineteen, I didn’t bring men home to my father’s house. I spared him at least that, Jamie.”

“I’d like to do her this one favor,” Jamie said.

“One favor? Jesus! You’ve been running yourself ragged over her ever since I’ve known you. A million and one favors, you mean.”

“I don’t want her to have to check into a hotel, Joanna. I think that would be difficult for her.”

“Fine, then, do what you like.”

“I want your okay on it.”

“Why? You live here, too, don’t you?”

“Then I’ll tell her she can stay, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Joanna?”

“I said sure.”

“Okay, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll tell her,” Jamie said, and went out of the room.

It was almost two in the morning when they got back to the Sixty-fifth Street apartment. The weather had turned cold again; he fumbled with stiff fingers to insert the key into the lock, and then opened the door, and turned on the table lamp in the entryway. There was the smell of marijuana in the air, Joanna detected it at once. Jamie went into the living room, snapped on the lights, and then stopped dead in his tracks, as though unexpectedly struck in the face by an unseen intruder. Joanna, turning from where she was hanging her coat on a wall peg beside Lissie’s fighter-pilot jacket, opened her eyes wide, and then went to stand speechlessly beside him. Aghast, they looked into the room.

A trail of debris stretched from the bay window fronting the street to the staircase leading to the upper stories, the flotsam and jetsam of what seemed to have been a wild party. Empty whiskey bottles lay scattered on the floor, glasses were on every table top. The ashtrays were bulging with butts and marijuana roaches, and someone had ground out a cigarette on the polished marble top of the mail table just inside the entrance door. A fire had been started in the fireplace, a log still smoldered there. But the screen had not been replaced afterward, and there were blown ashes and several large scorch marks on the Oriental rug just beyond the hearth. Someone had spilled a drink on one of the red plush-velvet easy chairs that flanked the fireplace. A white sweat sock was draped over one of the lampshades. A pair of panties, the crotch stained with what appeared to be menstrual blood, was crumpled on the floor near the big brass wood bucket.

Like hunters tracking a wild beast loose in their midst, they followed the spoor up the carpeted steps to the second floor of the building. The refrigerator door had been left ajar; its light cast illumination into the kitchen, revealing the stack of dirty dishes in the sink even before Jamie snapped on the overheads. A loaf of bread, an open box of cornflakes, a container of milk, a melting slab of butter were on the kitchen table. The mate to the sweat sock in the living room was on the range top, alongside a copper kettle that had been blackened because the flame under it had been allowed to burn too long and too hot. Down the hall, in the guest bedroom, the bed was unmade, and there were blankets and pillows on the floor. Whoever owned the stained panties in the living room had left her track upstairs as well, her menstrual blood ripening one of the white monogramed bath towels that had been a wedding gift from Joanna’s grandmother. Popcorn, matchsticks and newspapers trailed an uneven path across the carpeting. On the night table beside the bed, there was a syringe with a broken needle. A torn glassine packet lay beside the syringe, and beside that was one of Joanna’s sterling tablespoons, a wedding gift from her father, its bowl blackened.