Authors: Irving Wallace
“In the last hour I haven’t looked. I’ve been too busy. Sam, listen—”
“Estelle, you listen,” he said, indignant at being sidetracked by her wifely frivolity. “I know why you’ve been busy the last hour. You’ve had that goddam native boy in here, against my wishes, and don’t deny it. You have, haven’t you?”
Estelle’s face was pale and drawn. It surprised Sam, in these seconds of truth, how old she looked. “Yes,” she was saying, wearily, “Nihau has been here. He just left. Sam, I—”
Sam circled her like an avenging rooster, ready to peck her down. “I knew it, I knew it,” he crowed. “The first chance, you were going to wear the pants of the family. You know what’s right, you know what’s best. What’s in the heads of the mothers of our country? Why are they so sure they always know what is best for the children? Like the father doesn’t exist. Like fathers are second-class citizens, the serfs in the fields, to get up dough for this, dough for that, work our fingers to the bone, drag our weary asses back to the house, be permitted a scrap of food and a word or two with our children. I say nuts to that. I say have a vote in this house, and maybe my vote is more important than yours, where Mary comes in. If you could have seen what I saw in that school, that indecency in front of a sixteen-year-old, you’d spit on every one of them from the class, and I mean that Nihau especially; you’d throw him out on his ear, not invite him here to practice on our daughter what they’re preaching. I’m going in and tell Mary, too. I’ve had enough of this soft-pedaling. There’s a time for talk and a time for being tough, and I’ve had enough. I’m going in and I’m going to—”
“Sam—
shut up
!”
Estelle’s order penetrated Sam like a bullet at close range. It stopped him dead in his tracks and left him propped there, wounded and wondering, and about to go down. In the long years of their marriage together, through thick and thin, for better or worse, his Estelle had never used such language or such a disrespectful tone of voice to him. The world was coming to an end, and the disintegration was so awesome, he was left speechless.
Estelle was speaking. “You come in here like a raving maniac, not asking, not civilized, not caring what is what and who is where, but just a raving maniac. What’s got into you, I don’t know. I know only that from the minute you were in that classroom, and saw that your daughter was seeing a man and a woman, decent people, undressed for an anatomy lesson, you’ve parted from your senses. Such a who-ha about what? About what, Sam?”
He could not reply, because the unexpected rebellion, the
coup d’etat
, had toppled him unexpectedly. Where was his ammunition?
Relentlessly, the she-bandit continued to undermine domestic authority. “Sure, Nihau was here. Do you ask why? Sure, I’ve been looking for you. Do you think why? No, only a maniac shouting, like maybe somebody kicked you in the testicles. Maybe they should. Maybe I will. You want to give me hell and go in the back room and give your Mary hell. Do you ask if she’s even there? Now I’ll tell you, you maniac. She’s not in her room. She’s not in your house. She’s gone. Do you hear me straight? She’s gone, run away, just like in the magazine stories, she’s run away from home. Gone! Do you hear?”
His deeply sunken eyes rolled behind his thick spectacles, and out of his numbness came but one word. “Mary?”
“Our Mary, your Mary, my Mary, she’s run away.” Estelle’s hand was digging into the front pocket of her cotton housedress. She pulled out a scrap of paper and handed it to Sam. “Look at the fancy farewell note.” He snatched it, while Estelle recited its contents. “‘I’ve had enough. You don’t understand me and never will. I’m going away. Don’t try to find me. I won’t come back. Mary.’”
Estelle eased the childish note from her husband’s stiff fingers, stuffed it back in her pocket, and glanced at her mate. He still appeared to be in a catatonic state. Nevertheless, she went on, more levelly. “This is what I make of it. She’s a baby like you are a baby. She must do something to punish us, you for your foolishness and me for being loyal to you instead of taking her side. So off she goes, after the week of brooding and sulking. I wake up. The note is next to me. Her room is empty. You are gone. After you got up, she must have waited and then run away. Where—what—I don’t know. The whole morning I try to find you. No good. So I’ve got to think. What is there to do? I go to Maud Hayden. She calls Mr. Courtney. We all go to the Chief. He agrees, a searching party. So the last two hours they’re searching. The native boy who was here, Nihau—we should have such fine young men in Albuquerque, believe me—he comes here to tell me the progress being made, exactly what is going on. There are four groups of men in four directions looking for her, and he, Nihau, he is looking for her, too.”
Sam began to shake his head. He shook his head for ten seconds before speech was restored to him. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Now you can believe it,” said Estelle. “She’s sixteen, which is one thing and they are all half-here, half-there, capable of anything sometimes. And besides sixteen, she’s angry you let her down—her darling father, the one she can turn to—he let her down. So she is getting even.”
“So what do we do about it?” said Sam angrily. “Just stand here and gab?”
“Yes, that’s what we do, Sam. Where are we going to look? We don’t know the place. We’ll only get in the way, or get lost and they’ll have to send a searching party for us. Besides, I promised everyone we’d be here—if there is some word—”
“What got into her?” interrupted Sam. He began to march up and down the room, “Running away from home, my God—”
“About the running-away part I’m not so worried,” said Estelle. “This isn’t America. It’s a small island. Where can she run to?”
“But she—she can get hurt—fall in a hole—bump into an animal, a wild pig, a mad dog—starve to death—”
“It could happen. Still, I’m not worried about her. The natives know every inch of their island. They’ll find her.”
“What if they don’t?”
“They’ll find her,” Estelle reiterated, firmly. “Right now I’m less worried about Mary than her father.
He stopped. “What does that mean?”
“It means, God willing, they’ll find her sooner or later, and she’ll be safe and sound. But will she? What happens when they bring her back to us, and we bring her back to Albuquerque and her fast crowd? Now we’ve got a rebel who wants to fight us, show us, and will keep on doing so, unless some sense is knocked into her father’s head.”
“Suddenly, it’s me who’s all to blame?”
“I don’t say you are all to blame. Up to now we shared the good and bad our daughter is, we did our best, and we took credit equally for the good, and for the rest we made the small failures together. But since coming here, Sam, since last week, it’s you, it’s you and our Mary. You have got to straighten yourself out, Sam, and then we can straighten out Mary.”
Sam slammed a fist into a palm. “I still say I did right in the classroom! How could a father act differently? Estelle, again, I swear, if you’d been there—”
Estelle held up a majestic hand, to halt him as Mark Antony had stayed the multitude in the Forum at Julius Caesar’s funeral. Hypnotized by the classic gesture, Sam was still.
With controlled intensity, Estelle addressed her husband again. “Sam, give me the floor for once, let me speak, you listen, and what comes after that, let it come.” She paused, then went on. “Sam, examine yourself, look deep in your heart. For years you are enlightened, progressive, a liberal. You are so convincing, you have made me be like you, and I am proud we are both this way. We read all magazines, books, nothing banned from our house. We see all movies, all television, go to all lectures, invite over people of every kind. On politics, on sex, on religion, we are liberals. Right? Good. Suddenly, overnight, we are dropped down in a country where it’s not talk or books, where it’s for real, where a man named Wright, God knows how long ago, said let’s practice instead of preach. So here, right or wrong, they do things, community living, early sex education, cooperative children-raising, that for us was always theory. Maybe this is wrong. Maybe theories should stay theories, because when you try them out maybe it’s not so good. So here we are, and many things you have always believed, read about, talked about, they do, they try to do. And suddenly, for you, overnight, aha, it’s no good. Suddenly, when it comes to sex, and education, and your darling daughter, suddenly, it’s not so liberal with you and you’re acting like a bigoted prude, like Orville Pence. About him, we joke. Are you so different? Still, I can’t believe you are behaving like you really are, like the man I married, spent my whole life with. Sam, I remind you, when we were kids in the Village, you were wanting me to sleep with you before we were married—”
His face darkened, and he protested. “Estelle, that was absolutely different and you know it. We knew we would be married. It was just a question of my finishing with school and—”
“Aha, too close to home, eh? The shoe pinches. Sam, we slept together for a year without being married, and what if something went wrong and we didn’t marry? So, gone is my virginity, gone is my husband who was not my husband, and me, Estelle Myer, I was somebody’s daughter, my papa’s daughter, and one time my papa’s sixteen-year-old daughter.”
“I still say—”
“Say what you want, we were big liberals, not prudes like Orville Pence, and we didn’t just talk, we did. So was I so different from our daughter? But here the issue is not even the same. My papa, let him rest in peace, if he found out I was going to a school to be exposed to sex organs and positions yet, he would have pulled me out by the ear, spanked me, punched the principal in the nose, and sued the school system. But if he found out I was in the Village, a virgin, a child, his daughter, letting a young man named Sam Karpowicz, who he never knew, come in my bed all night, and seduce me, he would have killed you and killed me, both of us. I don’t say he would have been right. He was old-fashioned, narrow, a little ignorant except for the Old Testament and World Almanac, and we are a generation ahead, and liberal, and should show some improvement. So how does the new papa act to his daughter, not for sleeping with someone, but for going to a school to learn about anatomy and sex and being too bashful to tell him? He humiliates her in front of everyone. He shows her no tolerance. He practically drives her from the house. This is liberal?”
“You’re making me out an awful monster—”
“Like my father,” Estelle interrupted.
“—when I’m not at all,” insisted Sam. ‘Tm still the things I’ve tried to be. Despite what happened, I’m broad-minded, progressive, thinking of what’s good for everyone—”
“Not with your daughter, Sam. That’s where common sense ends and jealousy begins. That’s the beginning and the end of it, Sam, and I’ll bet Dr. DeJong would back me with every word. You’re possessive and you’re jealous of our Mary. Think, Sam. Remember way back, not so way back, even, when our Mary was six, maybe seven, always you wanting to hug her, hold her, keep her near you, a kiss for this and a kiss for that. And then for a while she was always slipping away from you, like a little eel, and when you told Dr. Brinley about this and the bed-wetting, he told you off good. Remember? He said she is not running away from you, but from her own feelings toward you, she couldn’t trust her own baby sexual feelings, and it made her escape your too much warmth, and it helped make her nervous, and maybe contributed to the bed-wetting.”
“Estelle, that’s not here or there—”
“It’s here and it’s now, Sam. She’s sixteen, half child, half grownup, and me she treats like a stupid stick of wood. If anybody can talk to her, if there’s anybody on earth she’ll listen to, she trusts, it’s her darling father, you. But still she is growing, and sixteen is not six, but you treat her like you did at six and seven and eight because you won’t let her go. You’re jealous to lose her, have her independent, have her learn about growing up, and what happened here proves it.”
“Nonsense.”
“Nonsense you say? Truth, I say! It’s clear to me now. As long as your self was not at stake, you could be the big, generous liberal. Everything was in our house. Companionate marriage.
New Masses
. Emma Goldman. Sacco-Vanzetti. Henry George. Veblen. Eugene Debs. John Reed. Lincoln Steffens. Bob La Follette. Populists. Spanish Loyalists. New Deal. Kinsey. The whole mishmash. And always I agreed it was good. Make the head broader, the world better. But always around the coffee table, it was liberal. Never did I ask myself what it would be like for real, if there was a test. Every penny you have invested in our house. What would you do if Negroes and Puerto Ricans moved into the neighborhood or tried to? Your whole heart you have invested in your daughter. What if in Albuquerque she started going steady with a Mexican or Indian boy? Would you say that you did not mind about the Negroes, yet maybe exclude them because you know they would be happier elsewhere? Would you say you did not mind about the Mexican boy but he better leave Mary alone for his own sake, because it would not work in the real world? Would you—”
“Cut it out, Estelle!” Sam’s face was livid. “What are you trying to make of me anyway? You know how I fought at the university for the ex-Communist who applied. You know I supported the petition to get colored instructors on the staff. And that petition when—”
“Petitions, Sam, petitions are good, a little brave, but not enough. On this island you are faced with the facts of life and yourself, and in the first test, you behave not like a liberal. I don’t say I approve of the sex education here, or exposing a sixteen-year-old girl, who has not been prepared for it, to such new things, such radical things, so soon. Of course, it might hurt her a little, confuse, or maybe it would not. We don’t know. But you have hurt her more, confused her more, this week, than that school could—by not supporting her or backing her, by changing in practice the standards you set for her in theory and big talk. She depended on the Sam Karpowicz she knew, and without warning there was another Sam Karpowicz she did not know. It’s not Mary’s running away from us that bothers me the worst. It’s your running away from us, Sam. That’s what I have to say.”