Эд Макбейн: Love, Dad

“Yeah, on the kitchen table,” Rusty said.

“Wherever,” Danny said. “My aunt had one done in New York for five hundred. My father’s sister.”

“That’s without anesthesia,” Beth said. “And that’s with some kind of butcher. I’ll bet Linda’s cost a lot more than that. Scarlett told me it was in a regular hospital and everything.”

“With anesthesia?” Judy asked.

“Sure, with anesthesia.”

“I’d rather have the baby,” Sally said.

“Me, too,” Rusty said.

“At fifteen?” David said. “Come on.”

“I would, I mean it.”

“Me, too.”

“That’s like trying to decide whether to burn your draft card or go fight the friggin’ war,” Roger said.

“I’m gonna burn mine,” Jimmy said. “In fact, I may not even go register when I’m eighteen. Hell with ’em.”

“They’ll throw you in jail,” Sally’s boyfriend said.

“That’s better than getting killed,” Danny said.

“Or wounded,” Jimmy said. “I think I’d rather get killed than wounded.”

“Me, too,” David said.

“Can you imagine coming back without legs or something?”

“Or blind?” Roger said. “Jesus, can you imagine coming back blind?”

“I’m not even gonna register,” Jimmy said.

“Well,” Sally said, mindful of the fact that her boyfriend had already registered and was certain to be called up within the next few months, “somebody’s gotta go over there.”

“Why?” Danny said.

“Well... to keep us free,” Sally said.

“Free to go to Puerto Rico for abortions,” Beth said, and everyone burst out laughing.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Jamie heard the sudden laughter and said, “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

The party at the Blairs’ that New Year’s Eve was scheduled to begin at nine-thirty, but Jamie and Connie did not arrive till almost an hour later. Lester Blair, whose proposed television special never had got off the ground, despite all his extravagant promises, had asked Jamie to bring along his camera, but Jamie flatly told him he did not take pictures on New Year’s Eve. Dressing that night before the party, he’d gotten miffed all over again, and began ranting out loud to Connie about the goddamn amateur photographers of the world who thought all there was to taking pictures was putting the camera to your eye and clicking the shutter release. Connie had heard all this before. “Yes, darling,” she said, over and over again as he fumed about the stupidity of someone asking a professional to bring along his Brownie, take a few candid snapshots, huh, Jamie, what do you say? I say go fuck yourself, Lester, that’s what I say. “Yes, darling,” Connie said.

Ever since 1954, a year after Jamie sold the Bowery essay to Life and was able to afford his own tuxedo, he’d been dressing for New Year’s Eve, putting on the enameled Schlumberger cuff links and studs Connie had bought him for his twenty-eighth birthday, tying his own bow tie, passing a cloth over his black patent-leather Gucci slippers, admiring himself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom closet door, preening, making imaginary acceptance speeches for the A.S.M.P.’s Magazine Photographer of the Year award, and generally considering himself to be the handsomest cat who’d ever come down the pike.

At forty-two, he did in fact look extremely youthful, his somewhat angular face dominated by brown eyes almost as dark as his hair, his six feet two inches neatly contained in a body he kept compact and spare via weekly visits to the New York Athletic Club whenever he was in the city to see his agent. He supposed there wasn’t a man on earth who didn’t think of himself as devastatingly handsome — he had learned early in his career that it was much more difficult to photograph men than it was women, the male of the species being inordinately vain — but he nonetheless felt that his subjective view of himself was entirely objective, and there was rarely an occasion when he looked into the mirror and was not pleased with the image looking back at him.

He felt enormously attractive tonight, Connie on his arm in a shimmering green gown slit to her navel, a lynx jacket thrown over her shoulders as they negotiated the slippery path to the Blair front door, he himself resplendent in his formal duds, his sense of wellbeing fortified by the two glasses of champagne he’d drunk in a New Year’s Eve toast with Lissie when he and Connie were ready to leave the house, and a quickie shot of Dewar’s neat at the wet-sink bar while Connie ran upstairs for a last-minute change of earrings. She was wearing her blond hair loose to the shoulders tonight, her green eyes emphasized by a paler green shadow, the eyes somewhat slanted and lending a faintly Oriental look to her lupine face with its aristocratic Vassar nose and generous mouth, dangling emerald earrings echoing the green of the dress and the brighter green of her eyes.

The oval driveway was crowded with the status symbol of the men and women who used the town as their bedroom community — no flashy Cadillacs here in Rutledge, where the foreign car reigned supreme. Like Jamie himself, many of the men who’d settled here had been raised during the Depression, when the secret vow was to rise triumphant from the ashes of poverty that had diminished and almost destroyed their parents. Self-made men each and every one of them, with the exception of Reynolds McGruder, father of the McGruder twins, whose own father had sold bootleg whiskey in Chicago during the thirties, and who was now chairman of the board and chief stockholder of one of the nation’s largest distilleries. Self-made men and proud of the fact that they had clawed their way — or so they remembered it — up America’s mythical ladder of success to achieve the comfort and in fact luxury (though somehow they never thought of it as such) of the lives they lived here in woodsy, exclusive Rutledge, Connecticut.

Diana Blair herself opened the front door for them, allowing a flood of music to escape onto the brittle night air, Nelson Riddle’s intro to Frank Sinatra’s “It Happened in Monterey.”

“Oooo, come in quick,” she said, “I’ll freeze to death.”

The prophecy, Jamie decided at once, was not without foundation; Diana stood in the doorway virtually naked, wearing a strapless, braless, flimsy white nylon sheath that recklessly revealed breasts rather more cushiony than his wife’s, a creamy white soft expanse against the cooler white of the gown, one pink nipple briefly exposed as she knelt to move aside the bristle doormat that prevented her from fully opening the door. The mat out of the way, the door standing wide, Diana stepped aside to allow them entrance, embracing Connie and kissing her on the cheek, kissing Jamie on the cheek as well (“Ooooo, I can feel the cold on you”) and then rubbing off the lipstick smear with her thumb. One of the Blair children, a twelve-year-old son from Lester’s previous marriage, materialized soundlessly and spectrally beside his stepmother, waited patiently while Jamie took off his overcoat and Connie shrugged out of the lynx jacket, and then vanished with the garments as ephemerally as he’d appeared.

The party was in full swing.

Jamie estimated there were at least sixty or seventy people in the Blairs’ massive stone-and-glass living room, dancing or drinking, standing in familiar clusters near the bar, chatting amiably on the sofas ranged in a lush semicircle around the walk-in fireplace, the fire blazing blues, reds, greens and oranges generated by chemicals sprinkled onto the six-foot-long logs, a magic dust obtainable at Harkins’ Hardware. They picked their way casually toward the bar, dispensing the customary handshakes and cheek pecks, “Hello, how are you, nice to see you,” the litany repeated over and again, even though most of these people had seen each other half a dozen times at various parties since the holiday season began.