Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

He listened to her, enchanted as she supplied the answers to all his questions, fascinated by the lilt of her voice, and its cadence, and the somewhat breathy rush of it, surely not her own voice but something acquired here at Vassar, and remembering the old line attributed to Dorothy Parker: “If you laid every Vassar girl end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I adore Vassar,” Connie said. “I’m in my freshman year, I room with a girl who lives on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I’m majoring in speech and dramatics and minoring in psychology, and I, uh, don’t really enjoy dancing this close.” He backed away from her at once and told her he himself was a graduating senior at Yale (“Well, sure , Yale,” she said, and he realized how dumb he’d just been; there were only Yalies at the mixer) and that he was majoring in political science and minoring in history, but that he had recently and pretty much by accident become interested in photography and had joined—

“By accident?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I found a camera.”

“Found a camera?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where? What kind of camera?”

“On the Commons. In New Haven. On a bench in the park there.”

“Well... well, whose camera is it? I mean, is it an expensive camera?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I checked it out, it’s worth about three hundred bucks. It’s a Leica. Do you know anything about cameras?”

“Nothing.”

“Neither did I, until I joined the Photography Club. I figured if I owned a good camera...”

“Well, it’s not really your camera.”

“Yes, I think it is. Now it is. I put an ad in the paper, you see, the New Haven Register, and I asked whoever’d lost a camera to give me a call, and nobody did.”

“Did you describe it?”

“No, of course not. Then anyone in the world could’ve claimed it.”

“Well, that’s right. Mmm. Yeah.”

“I even developed the roll of film that was in it, figuring there’d be pictures of people, you know, somebody recognizable, but the whole roll was of buildings. Not the whole roll because he’d only taken six or seven pictures, but all of buildings.”

“Maybe he was an architect.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I figure the camera’s mine now, and since I’ve got it, I’ve been making use of it. Want me to take your picture sometime?” he said, and grinned.

“Sure,” she said. “When?”

He looked at her.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“Why would I be?”

“I don’t know, I just... I mean, we’ve hardly said a dozen words to each other.”

“Well, don’t you want to?”

“Sure,” he said. “Hey, cool.”

Connie’s reputation, he discovered on their first date (“I told you so,” Maury Atkins said), was firmly rooted in fact. Try as hard as he might, Jamie could not convince her to engage in anything more intimate or spirited than the rather expert kissing she’d learned from one of her older sister’s boyfriends one night while Janet was at the ballet with a visiting junior from Harvard. “He was some kisser,” Connie disclosed after she and Jamie had been kissing for something close to two hours in the front seat (they had not yet graduated to the back seat) of the used Dodge he’d bought three years earlier with the back pay he’d accumulated overseas. Jamie recalled the story told by one of the stand-up comics about the ugly man walking down the street and thinking he had an extremely beautiful mouth because he overheard one girl saying to another, “Did you see the kisser on that guy?” He did not tell the joke to Connie that night because she was, in fact, a very good kisser; he was tempted instead to ask her for the name of her sister’s long-ago boyfriend so that he might send him a dozen roses and a letter of recommendation. It was a pity, Jamie thought after their fifth date, when he was already hopelessly in Connie’s thrall, that Janet’s boyfriend (whose name had been Archie Halpern, a hell of a name for such a good kisser) hadn’t taught Connie the joys of petting as well.

For this oversight, Jamie was obliged to devote much of his energy during the harsh winter of 1950 attempting entry into Connie’s laden blouse, the buttons on which were guarded as jealously as had been the gates of Stalingrad during World War II. By spring, he did manage to steal one or the other of his sneaky hot hands onto her sweatered, shirted, bloused or blanketed (this one day when he popped into her unlocked hotel room in New Haven and surprised her naked in bed with nothing but a blanket over her) mounds, but never would she allow him to touch those prized beauties in the flesh. He heard with some surprise, therefore, that Fodderwing Foley had put in his hand, so to speak, during the torrid summer of 1950.

Fodderwing’s true name was Frederick; he was only later rebaptized, cruelly and in anger, by Jamie. He was the son of one of Peter Harding’s oldest friends, and he was to be here in New York City for two weeks only, visiting from someplace in Iowa (was there such a place as Pomeroy, Iowa?) and enjoying the Hardings’ hospitality, and the use of their guest room, and — as it later turned out — the ample use of their daughter’s until-then sacrosanct bosom. Fodderwing was Jamie’s identical age — twenty-four in that summer of 1950 — and he had been with the infantry in Europe and had suffered frostbite on all the toes of his left foot, which toes were later amputated at an Army field hospital, leaving him with a discernible limp that did much to encourage excessive sympathy for a young man who was exceedingly handsome anyway. Jamie distrusted him from the moment he took his hand and felt its warm, dry clasp, looked into those limpid brown eyes and glimpsed the soul of a seducer within, studied that almost feminine mouth with its pouting lower lip and Cupid’s bow upper, and thought at once of Janet’s former boyfriend who’d taught Connie to kiss.

As Foley limped his way to the bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, the one that had been Janet’s when she’d been living here in New York before her marriage, Jamie felt a distinct tremor of foreboding. He and Connie had as yet exchanged no formal declarations of enduring love, but it was tacitly understood that they were “going steady” and that one day, perhaps after Connie’s graduation in June of 1953, by which time Jamie hoped to have established himself as a working photographer here in the Big Apple, one day they might consider getting engaged and then, maybe , sometime in the distant future, think about getting married. Or at least that was the way Connie seemed to consider their relationship. If Jamie had had his way, they’d have been married already. But she was, after all, only nineteen years old in that summer of 1950, and whereas she was a very good kisser, she seemed so terribly — young. Certainly too young to even consider marriage at this early stage of her womanhood. Marriage? She had just completed her freshman year, she would only be entering her sophomore year in the fall. Marriage? She was, for Christ’s sake, only nineteen years old!

Fodderwing Foley, the prick, thought it might be nice to seduce young Constance Tate Harding. Jamie could forgive him this; he had, after all, begun his relationship with Connie with the same rapierlike thought in mind, nor had its edge been dulled over the intervening nine months. What he could not forgive was the fact that the son of a bitch damn near succeeded! Whereas Jamie had been toying with Connie’s buttons like a safecracker all through the winter, spring and part of the summer, searching for the combination to the vault wherein the treasures lay; whereas Jamie had had his wrists caught and firmly held more times than a trapeze artist doing a double somersault without a net; whereas Jamie had pleaded and persuaded only to be scolded and excoriated; whereas Jamie had exhausted every male wile at his command in an attempt to weaken the resolve of Constance C. T. Hard-On Snow Queen Harding, that son-of-a-bitch son of her father’s best friend, that son-of-a-bitch guest in the third bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, had to do nothing more than march in there one night while she was asleep and naked, and fondle her to his heart’s content, claiming the twin turrets of her femaleness as though they were cherished hills overlooking some disputed valley to be taken by an invading American army.