“Daddy’s weak, Peter, and self-indulgent, and all the rest of it, but he really doesn’t think marrying me off to one of the world’s richest men is such a horrible fate. Of course, he doesn’t know about Nino’s… condition.” The waiter was hanging about, and I said haughtily, “I’m hungry,” which I was not. “Are you trying to starve me?”
We ordered something, I think mine was a veal cutlet that had been breaded in library paste-their marvelous chef must have been off today-and Peter kept asking me district attorney-type questions about the agreement I had been forced to sign before the wedding. I suppose he was desperate, poor darling, because we’d been over that Berlin wall a dozen times previously without finding a loophole or the sorriest chink. I had to point out to him again that for the five-year term of the agreement I have absolutely no financial claim on Nino or his estate, and if I left his bed (!) and board before the expiration date it would not only strand me without a Hungarian pengo but he could-and positively would-sic the gendarmes on daddy and have him packed off to jail on the old embezzlement charge.
“Is his money so important to you?” How Peter’s lip curled.
“I hate it. And him! For Pete’s sake, Peter, you can’t really think it’s the money. I told you. I’d gladly accept any kind of decent life, no matter how much of a struggle it would be, if not for-”
“Right back to dear old dad again,” Peter said, grinding his teeth. “Oh, damn him! When’s the due date?”
“Of what, Peter?”
“The agreement. When the five years are up. That’s one of Nino’s private papers he’s never let me in on.”
“What’s today? December 9. Well, it expires 9 months from today, on Nino’s 68th birthday, which is also our fifth anniversary. September 9 next year.”
“Nine months,” Peter said in a very peculiar way.
I hadn’t realized till Peter repeated it, and it struck me funny, so I laughed. Peter did not, and at the expression on his face I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “What’s the matter now, Peter? What is it?”
He said, “Nothing.”
The way he said it…
I know it was definitely not nothing. It was something. Something terrible. I mean what was going through that blond, frustrated, furious head. I didn’t even want to think about what it might be. I wanted to wipe it out of my head just as fast as I possibly could. I told myself my Peter couldn’t be thinking unthinkable thoughts like that. Even in fury. Or fantasy. Or anything.
But I knew he could. And was.
Does one ever really dig another human being? Not excluding the man one loves? And I mean dig? In every sense?
At that moment I didn’t know Mr. P. Ennis, 30, Harvard ‘59, confidential secretary to Nino Importuna, Julio Im-portunato, and Marco Importunato, in charge of the three brothers’ personal affairs… I didn’t know him from any stranger brushed against in the street.
It frightened me.
It still does.
And that wasn’t all that made today so bitchy. As I was staring across the table at Peter, biting on my napkin, I saw over his shoulder-just walking into the restaurant-my father. At the moment I spotted him I noticed a flashy chick near him, but whether she was with him or coming in alone I never did find out. The big thing that concerned me was that he mustn’t see me with Peter. Because not even daddy knows about Peter and me. He’d never consciously betray me to Nino, but he does take a few drinks too many sometimes, and Nino is a breathing radar-he plucks information out of empty air. I simply couldn’t risk it.
I said under my breath to Peter, “Peter, there’s my father-no, don’t look-he mustn’t see us together…!”
Bless Peter. He casually dropped a $20 bill on the table and strolled me toward the rear, so that our backs were to daddy all the way. We pretended to go to the rest rooms but instead we escaped through an utterly blase kitchen staff. There’s not much you can do to make New York service people look up from their appointed chores short of planting a bomb under them.
It was a close call, too close, and I told Peter outside that we didn’t dare rendezvous in public again. He took one look at my stricken face, kissed me, and put me into a cab.
But my love wasn’t through with me. Oh, no! Just before he slammed the cab door Peter said in a low, throbby sort of voice, “There’s only one thing for me to do and, by God, when the time is ripe I’m going to do it.”
That was the last I’ve seen of him today.
But that remark of Peter’s has been haunting me. That, and the look on his face a few moments before daddy walked into the restaurant.
9 months…
It’s as if something was conceived today in the womb of time. I hope and pray I’m wrong, because if I glimpsed in Peter’s eyes what I think I glimpsed, and if his parting shot to me meant what I think it meant, the embryo’s going to turn out to be a thalidomide baby, or worse.
It’s a very morbid thought, and I’m becoming incoherent besides. I see I’ve finished over half the fifth of zatsomac, and I’m good and smashed, which I almost never allow myself to get because I might grow to like it too much, and to hell with you and you and you too Mrs. Calabash. I’d better totter off and tuck my lil ole self into beddy-snooky-bye.
First Month JANUARY, 1967
Gestation, the carrying or hearing, has begun.
The zygote has become a mul-ticelled embryo. It has grown to the size of a pea and its core to the size of a pinhead.
The cells in this core now form a ridge, at one end of which an in finitesimal knob takes shape. It is the beginning of the head.
Second Month FEBRUARY, 1967
Before the latter part of the second month it is not possible, from ordinary observation, to determine whether the embryo is of a human being or a dog.
But after the first eight weeks, it takes on the unmistakable semblance of humanity.
By now it is no longer an embryo.
It is a fetus.
Third Month MARCH, 1967
The eyes are no longer on the sides of the head but have approached each other. Tiny slits mark the ears and nostrils, a larger slit marks the mouth. The forehead has grotvn massive. The upper limbs show fingers, wrists, forearms. The internal reproductive organs can now be distinguished as to sex.
Fourth Month APRIL, 1967
During this period the abdomen develops with notable rapidity, reducing the disproportion between the head and the rest of the fetus.
Hair emerges on the head.
The mother begins to feel the stir of her little parasite.
Fifth Month MAY, 1967
The halfway stage of the pregnancy finds the lower portion of the fetus’s abdomen enlarging proportionately, and the legs beginning to catch up.
The mother is note very much aware of what she is bearing. Its arms and legs are in frequent vigorous motion in her body.
Ellery had had his study done over in driftwood paneling, a choice that had seemed inspired at the time. The pitted and irregularly furrowed surface looked as if it had been clawed by the tides of years, and it was artistically stained a salty sea-foam gray. Contemplating it, he could feel the rise and fall of his floor and little imaginary stings on his cheeks. With the air conditioner set to maximum, it was very hard to keep reminding himself that he was not on the deck of a pleasure craft plowing up the Sound.
This proved a serious deterrent to the requirements of reality. The conversion of his workaday walls had altered his environment to the critical point, turning a functional study in an ordinary Manhattan apartment into a playful distraction. Ellery had always held that, for the most efficient use of time and the maintenance of a schedule, a writer required above all things a working atmosphere of familiar discomfort. One should never change so much as the Model T pencil sharpener on the windowsill. The very grime around the ratholes was an encouragement to labor. In the ancient metaphor, the creative flame burned brightest in dark and dusty garrets; and so forth.