Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

That he did not capture the tinier bastion below had been a miracle of self-restraint: Connie’s. In August — long after Fodderwing had once again departed for the more tranquil pastures of Pomeroy, Iowa, or Ohio, or wherever the hell he lived — she told Jamie all about that simmering steamy night in July, Freddie sneaking into her room and playing with her breasts all night long, kissing them and sucking them and stroking them and probing them and patting them, all of which had been excruciatingly nerve-racking for her, even though terribly exciting, the whole strenuous battle all night long, you know, to keep from doing what he really wanted her to do, and which of course she could not allow herself to do. (“I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you,” Jamie thought as she told him her perfidious tale.)

He asked her, as well he might have, why she’d allowed Fodderwing into her bed to begin with. She explained that she hadn’t allowed him in, he’d simply come in, the same way Jamie had come into her hotel room that morning in New Haven when she’d accidentally left the door unlocked, and had found her naked in bed with just a blanket over her, which was the way she slept and which was the way Freddie had found her, too. When Jamie pointed out that in New Haven she hadn’t allowed him to climb between the sheets with her, had in fact raised a fuss that could have been heard in Paris, France, she explained that she hadn’t allowed Freddie to climb between the sheets, either, he had just done it, and she hadn’t been able to yell the way she had in New Haven because Mommy and Daddy were sleeping right next door, and this was Daddy’s best friend’s son, so what could she possibly do? It had all been just too impossible, and so she had suffered his advances and had got herself very, well, wet and, well, excited all night, but had nonetheless managed to save herself (except for her breasts) for whoever, you know, she might, you know, one day marry.

“So why the fuck are you telling this to me?” Jamie shouted in a rage. “What makes you think I want to know about your sordid little... your... your breast job with that... that toeless wonder... that that that Fodderwing —” and this was where Jamie baptized him after the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings character — “why tell me, go tell your Daddy whose best friend’s son that fucking cocksucker...”

“Jamie, I don’t like that kind of language,” Connie said. “I told you because if we ever do get married...”

“No!” he shouted. “No, we’re not going to get married, Connie! No, we are—”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course we are.”

It was Jamie’s guess (and he was almost right) that his daughter, at seventeen, had never even been kissed, and he found the contradiction of her sophisticated demeanor and her true inexperience completely enchanting. He took her to see a sneak preview of a movie titled Last Summer that night, and was appalled by the behavior of the three teenage kids in it, all of them presumably Lissie’s age, but none of them even remotely like her. He did not once regret having missed the McGruder party, did not in fact even remember it until he was already in bed at eleven-thirty. From his motel room, he asked the information operator for the McGruder number in Rutledge, and then dialed it. Betty McGruder answered the phone on the fourth ring. There was the sound of music, laughter and voices behind her. He visualized her standing at the phone with one finger in her ear.

“Betty,” he said, “this is Jamie. Can I talk to Connie, please?”

“Where are you, you dirty dog?” Betty said.

“Up here in Shottsville.”

“Where the hell is Shottsville?”

“Up here someplace,” he said. “Sounds like a good party.”

“It’s a mag nif icent party, I may never speak to you again for missing it. Let me see if I can find her.”

He heard the receiver clattering onto the tabletop, heard Betty yelling, “Connie! Jamie’s on the phone! Has anyone seen Connie?” He listened to the background din.

“Hello?” Connie said.

“Hi, honey, how’s the party?”

“Terrific,” she said flatly. “Parties are always marvelous when your husband’s in Nome, Alaska.”

“Where were you?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Took you a long time to get to the phone.”

“Oh. Some of us are in the den playing Dictionary. How’s Lissie?”

“Fine. We went to a movie.”

“When are you coming home?”

“After lunch tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll be able to come to the Guild with me.”

“What time is the opening?”

“Three o’clock, I think.”

“Yes, sure.”

“Where are you now?”

“In bed,” Jamie said.

“Alone?”

“No, with two black girls.”

“I believe it,” Connie said.

“Want to talk to them? Lula Belle, my wife wants to say hello.”

“Take pictures,” Connie said. “I want to see if I approve of your taste.”

“Haven’t got my camera with me. Edna Mae, my wife wants to know how I taste.”

Connie laughed.

“See you tomorrow, honey,” he said, smiling. “How long are you going to be at that party?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How would you define ‘peculate’?”

“Peculate?” He thought for a moment, and then said, “To rummage aimlessly.”

“Good, I’ll use it. Give Lissie my love.”

“I will. Good night, darling,” he said, and hung up.

He recognized at lunch the next day that he and Lissie were collaborators of a sort, recklessly conspiring to nullify the punishment meted by the school. He felt, along with her, that the punishment was absurd, and he firmly believed that it was essential to reduce absurdity of any kind to its lowest level of idiocy. Lissie had not been smoking pot, and the rest was utter nonsense. The rest, in fact, had been behavior he considered somewhat creative. Lissie sensed his approval and plundered it like a pirate, teasingly asking him to come up on the following weekend, even though it was an academic weekend when normally she would not have been allowed home. He drew the line there, telling her he’d end up in a divorce court if he left her mother alone at home on yet another weekend. Lissie’s face went suddenly sober.

“You’d never even consider divorcing Mom, would you?” she asked.

“Never in a million years,” he said.

He was lying.

Lissie’s academic weekend officially started after her fourth-period class on Friday, February 28. Jamie, as he’d promised, did not go up to see her; neither was she allowed to go home, since that would have amounted to a total revocation of the Intermediate Discipline she was allegedly suffering. On Saturday afternoon, she and her roommate Jenny played a vigorous if amateurish game of squash, showered and washed their hair afterward, and were sitting in bras and panties on one of the locker-room benches, waiting for their hair to dry more completely before venturing out into the cold.

Jenny lived in New York City with her mother and her stepfather, and she went to thousands of Broadway shows each year, and had the albums for all of them, not to mention the albums for another thousand she’d never seen. She was almost eighteen, six months older than Lissie, and she still used the name Groat, even though her stepfather wanted to adopt her and give her his name. She liked her stepfather a lot, but his name was Fenner, and Jenny could just feature calling herself Jenny Fenner! She’d never met her real father, who’d abandoned Jenny’s mother the minute he learned she was pregnant; but according to what her mother had told her, she resembled him a lot, with the same black hair and brown eyes, and the same upturned little Irish nose. Groat, she proudly informed Lissie, was an Irish name going all the way back to the days of the widcairns.