Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

“Wonderful city, isn’t it? Old San Juan, I mean. Rio Piedras is another thing again. Beautiful, of course, but with none of San Juan’s charm. How did you like the old cobble-stoned streets?”

“They—”

“Built by the Spaniards, you know. Centuries ago. No automobiles then. Built for horses. Give the city an old-world flavor. Wouldn’t change it for all the tea in China. Can’t you just picture the conquistadores riding down those streets in full armor?”

“Well, I—”

“Have you been out to Morro?”

“No, we didn’t get—”

“You mustn’t miss El Morro,” Hebbery said. “A wonderful treat.”

“We’ll try not to—”

“Has Christmas shopping started in New York yet?” Anne asked.

“No, it’s a little early yet—”

“She talks as if we’re out in the middle of the Pacific someplace,” Hebbery said.

“No,” Anne replied, “we’re out in the middle of the Atlantic.”

“The Caribbean, honey,” Hebbery said. “The romantic Caribbean.”

“Yeah,” Anne said flatly.

“Here’s Eve now,” Larry said, rising and signaling to her.

She had come into the bar and paused, looking about her somewhat aloofly. He knew the manner was affected, but she nonetheless presented the portrait of a poised, self-sufficient, faintly bored young lady. She was wearing an ice-blue satin sheath, pearls at the throat.

“Excuse me,” he said, and he went to meet her. He took her hand and whispered, “Hi, beautiful.”

“Hi. Do I look all right?”

“You look very sweet.”

“That’s not what I want to hear.”

“No?”

“No. Tell me I look sexy.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm,” she said, and she smiled knowingly.

“Well! Well well.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Eve said. “How’s Hebbery?”

“Bueno,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Come on, we’ll join them.”

“It got nice and cool, didn’t it?” Eve said.

“Did it?” He grinned. “I thought it got warmer all at once.” He squeezed her hand and, both grinning, they walked to the bar.

Winter arrived on Sunday.

Like an old man coming home to die too early, it appeared grayly and suddenly on the horizon.

And while Eve and Larry Cole listened to an endless succession of “Buenos” from Frank Hebbery as he showed them through the Rain Forest in the Bosque National del Caribe, with the burning Puerto Rican sun shielded by the arch of trees; as they stood beside a cascading waterfall, the water leaping and rushing over a smooth sheer wall of rock; as they stood in the secret, shrouded silence of growth as old as time, confronted with the immensity of nature’s construction; as they stood in El Yunque on a tropical island, Margaret Gault sat in the kitchen of her Cape Cod development house 1,425 miles to the north and listened to her mother, and winter stared bleakly through the window-panes.

“I want to know what happened to you this summer,” Mrs. Wagner said.

They sat across from each other at the round pine-top kitchen table which Margaret had bought at an antique shop in New Jersey, the twenty-seven-year-old blonde, and the fifty-two-year-old blonde who was her mother.

The fifty-two-year-old blonde was a handsome woman with brown eyes that did not miss very much. She was somewhat plump, with the bosom of a matron, and there were age wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her chin was getting weak, and her neck was loosening in the dissolute pattern of age. But you could tell that Elizabeth Wagner had once been a beauty. You could know with certainty that she had danced the Charleston and the Bunny Hug, bound her breasts tightly in an era when boyishness was considered girlishness, so tightly that she’d almost damaged the supporting muscles but not quite, thankfully, so that they were still firm and rounded when girls got back to being girls.

Elizabeth Wagner no longer sported the natural ash-blonde hair which had been hers when she’d sampled gin from a bathtub at distillation parties, scooping it up in a teacup so that after the fourth cup the gin tasted mellowed and aged in the wood, even though it was the same horrible gut-rotting stuff which had been drunk hours before when the aging, mellowing process began. The hair now had expert care under the hands of a beautician and it combined with the brown eyes to lend a look of hardness to the woman.

She leaned across the table, her bosom on her folded arms, and hoped there was motherly concern in her eyes. But concern had gone out of those eyes a long time ago, and her daughter knew it, and so they sat, strangers who had once an eternity ago been attached with a cord through which the same rich blood has surged.

“What happened this summer?” Mrs. Wagner said, and Margaret watched her and thought, I would no more tell you what happened this summer than I would tell the milkman.

“Lots of things,” she said. “There were parties and barbecues. You know how it is in a small development.”

“You know what I mean, Margaret. You know exactly what I mean. Don’t start telling me about parties and barbecues. I’m not interested in them.”

“What are you interested in, Mother?”

She had stopped calling her “Mom” or “Ma” or “Mama” on the day her grandfather died. On that day her mother stopped being a blood relation and became only another woman named Elizabeth Wagner, a woman who had done something unspeakably horrible. She would have called her Elizabeth now except that it was not in her make-up to call this other woman by her first name. And so she had chosen the coldest word she knew within the limitations of the mother-daughter relationship she denied, and that word was “Mother.”

“I’m interested in you ,” Mrs. Wagner said.

“You’re interested in me?” Margaret asked, and a small sardonic smile touched her mouth.

“You’re like me,” Mrs. Wagner said. “You’re my daughter. You look the way I looked when I was your age, and I can see in your eyes what was in mine. So I don’t have to hear what happened this summer. I know what happened.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t ask me.”

“But not the way it happened with me, Margaret, not that way at all. That’s in your eyes, too. Whatever happened wasn’t good.” Mrs. Wagner paused. “Margaret, I don’t care what you think of me, or what—”

“Mother—”

“Or what—”

“Mother, lower your voice.”

“They’re watching the football game in the parlor, the two hemen. Don’t worry about them. Listen to me, Margaret. When it happened to me, it was everything — and that’s the difference. And that’s what you’ll never be able to understand, that’s what you don’t want to understand.”

“I don’t—”

“Nothing else mattered, Margaret. Not your father, and not you, and not... not your grandfather, either. There was only—”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

“When will you want to hear it?”

“Never.”

“Don’t judge me, Margaret. I’m not to be judged by you. I’m still your mother, you know.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, damnit, I am. And I know a little more about life and living than you might imagine.”

“I imagine you know a great deal about life and living, Mother,” Margaret said.

Mrs. Wagner sighed heavily. “You’re a very cold person, Margaret,” she said. “You’re very cold.”

“I’m sorry if I—”

“Very cold. I would like to talk to you. I would really like to be able to talk to you. I used to wonder, when it happened, how I could explain it to you, how I would tell you when you were old enough to listen. That was what bothered me most, do you know? What will my daughter think, what will my daughter think? Oh, I know how you feel about what I did later, but that was a part of it too, all a part of it, and only because of what happened, only because I was so desperately—”