Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

Professor J. D. Berkowitz was the last of the triumvirate, a learned scholar whom one would not dare call by her first name, no less her hated middle name, Doris. Professor Berkowitz was a pontificator who pronounced her theories and dictums in a voice reminiscent of his own Connie’s V.S. and D.M. voice, although the professor was quick to point out that she’d never been to a “genuine” college, in that the Juilliard School paid scant attention to anything but music and, as a result, sometimes turned out people who were virtual illiterates in any other field. She had felt this most keenly in her freshman year there, after the more catholic education at Fieldston-Riverdale. The voice she assumed for Professor J. D., in fact, was the result of that private school education, or so Jamie surmised, a bit nasal, a bit New Canaan corporation wife-ish, culturally affected, totally phony, her teeth clenched, her Gothic nose tilted as though she smelled something recently dead in the room.

She used this voice when she quoted, with presumed accuracy, any psychological premise picked up from the redoubtable Dr. Mandelbaum, the Tweedledee to Frank Lipscombe’s Tweedledum. She used it when she told him what her politics were: she voted Democrat and considered herself a liberal, but many of the views she held (about welfare giveaways, for example, or bilingual public notices in New York) seemed conservative if not downright reactionary. She used it when she told him about her father’s work or her Uncle Izzy’s, but never when she discussed her own; the instrument she played was the secure domain of Joanna La Flute, its borders sealed to either Joanna Jewish or the professor.

At 4:00 P.M., reluctantly, he went into the bathroom to shower. Joanna was leaning nude against the sink, smoking marijuana, watching him as he lathered himself, the outline of his naked body blurred behind the mottled glass door of the shower stall.

“What time is your train?” she asked.

“I can catch an express at five-oh-five.”

“To where?”

“Stamford. My car’s at Stamford.”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“A Corvette,” he said. “Why?”

“Just want to know.”

He came out of the shower stall, took a towel from the rack, and began drying himself.

“Look at it,” she said. “All sweet and clean and soft. Let me dry your back.” She took a last drag, threw the roach into the toilet bowl, and then flushed it down. Taking the towel from him, she said, “Turn,” and began briskly drying his back. “Will I see you next week?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Same as today? Eleven-thirty, twelve?”

“I’ll have to look at my book,” she said. “I know we’ve got Figaro next Wednesday night, but I’m not sure whether there’s a rehearsal of anything.”

“Well, I’ll call you.”

“No, I’ll check it before you leave.”

Her hand reached around him.

“Hey,” he said. “Train to catch.”

“When’s the next one?” she asked.

“I really have to get home,” he said.

“When’s the next train?” she said, and her hand tightened on him.

He turned to her. He took her in his arms. He looked into her face. “Next time,” he said. “Okay?”

“No, this time,” she said, “okay?” and fell to her knees before him, and wrapped her arms around his legs, and took him savagely in her mouth. He placed his hands on top of her head. He closed his eyes. Her mouth was relentless. And suddenly, she pulled away from his erection, her lips sliding free, her hand cradling him rigid and pulsing against her cheek. Looking up at him, she whispered, “When’s the next train, Jamie?”

“Six-oh-five,” he said.

“An express?”

“Yes.”

“You have time,” she said, and took his hand and led him back into the bedroom.

He was in New York again that Saturday, scouting the landmark buildings with the Times people, and was through with his work by eleven o’clock. On the offchance that Joanna might be home, he called, surprised when she answered the phone. She told him they were performing Turn of the Screw that afternoon at two-fifteen, which meant she had to be in her chair at about two or a little after, which further meant she’d have to leave the apartment no later than twenty to. She apologized profusely, explaining that the Britten opera was scored for a sort of miniature orchestra, but that as first flutist she had to be there to play alto and piccolo. Could he... would he be willing... did he think he might be able to come over for just a little while? He caught a taxi from the Flatiron Building and was uptown in her apartment twenty minutes later.

In bed with her again, the blinds drawn, the blankets hastily thrown back, Jamie learned that she had yet another personality in her multilingual fold, outdoing the schizophrenic Eve by at least one — so far. (Had Mandelbaum discovered over the course of the past several months what Jamie was discovering in a scant four days? He doubted it.) This personality, and the voice accompanying it, emerged only when she was totally relaxed and unguarded, as she seemed to be now. If any of the voices was authentic, if any of the personalities truly reflected the real Joanna (whoever that might have been, lost in the facelessness of the crowd she was), Jamie considered this to be the one. He dared not label her. She was, simply enough, Joanna.

It was this Joanna who emerged when she told him about the untimely death of her mother, so soon after her return from Rome. It was this Joanna who told him about her first sexual experience, terrifying in that her bedmate (or more appropriately her carmate, since the seduction had taken place in the back seat of a Pontiac convertible) had been a member of the enemy camp, a goy from the tips of his toes to the very ends of his flaming red tresses, worn long in that year of 1961, when Joanna was seventeen and a senior at Fieldston-Riverdale. “My mother, aleha ha-shalom, would have died right then if she’d known,” Joanna said. “Thank God, she never found out.”

David Boyle, for such was the young seducer’s name, had fumbled below her waist for almost an hour and a half before achieving penetration. By that time, Joanna was sore in both senses of the word, feeling pain whenever he thrust his less-than-massive (she later realized) penis against her, and angry as hell besides, her ardor diminishing with each new rigorous assault. Her initiation into the mysteries of poke and probe was not helped a whit by the fact that young David (“How’d an Irish mick get a nize Jush name like David?” she asked, reverting to her Joanna Jewish voice) wasn’t wearing a condom and came all over her the moment he succeeded in parting her reluctant portals. She had him drive her posthaste to the nearest open grocery store, where she purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola and improvised an on-the-spot Pontiac douche, but she worried for the better part of a month that she would have to tell her mother she’d gotten pregnant by a goy. Boyle was almost as worried as she was. On Christmas Day, when Joanna got her period at last, she called him at home and — because both her parents were within earshot of her end of the conversation — asked, “What goes with green for a merry Christmas?”

Boyle didn’t know what the hell she meant. “Huh?” he said.

“Red,” she said.

“Does that mean...?”

“Yes, I got it,” she said.

“Phew,” he said.

When she hung up, her mother asked, “Who was that?”

“A boy named David Fein,” Joanna said.

“What is it you got?” her father asked.

“He sent me a little Chanukah gift.”

Her father went back to reading his copy of Variety. Her mother glanced at her a moment longer, and then continued knitting a sweater she’d been working on since July.