I’m doing this all wrong, he thought. I sound like the voice of the ages, the wise old man of the hills, she hasn’t experienced this, damn it, she doesn’t know that people come and go, she doesn’t know what life is all about.
Yes, and do you? he asked himself.
“Kate...”
Do you? he asked himself.
“Kate, I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt your mother,” he said. “I’d strangle him with my bare hands.”
Yes, and that explains love, doesn’t it? That explains it all to a seventeen-year-old girl who is going to a dance tonight where someone will ask her to wait for him, did I ask anyone to wait for me? No, but Amanda was waiting. Amanda was...
“Kate,” he said, and suddenly realized he could not talk to her, and was filled with a desperate lonely sadness. I cannot talk to my own daughter, he thought. “Kate,” he said, “you’ll know when you’re in love, don’t rush into anything,” crap, he thought, baloney, bull, crap, nothing, why can’t I talk to her, and tell her what, and tell her of the girl on the hill overlooking the town, and tell her of Helen Kennedy, and tell her of the girls in Boston, and tell her of Kitty Newell, all of whom I loved in a way, all of whom took a part of me, Matthew Bridges, and from whom I accepted something, tell her not to hurt, tell her to be kind, “Kate, don’t hurt him,” he said, tell her of a love beyond the physical exchange, did she know of this already, has she been kissed, has she been touched, what can I tell her, and why can’t I speak to her?
So all the platitudes came out, all the father-daughter jazz evolved from a long line of father-daughter conversations starting with Eve and the biggest father of them all, and ending perhaps with Tracy Lord in Philadelphia, and he thought wildly of love as he explained patiently to her, explained that Paul would be more hurt if she accepted his love when she really couldn’t return it, thought of his very real and long-ago concern with people until somewhere he had lost the capacity, thought how sad it was to be sitting here with a daughter who was almost grown up, a daughter troubled because she didn’t want to hurt someone she liked, and thinking back to all the people he had possibly hurt in the past, and telling her she had a long life ahead of her, and that one day she would find the person she instinctively knew was the right person for her, telling her this while believing there was no single right person in the world for any other person, but giving his daughter all the time-honored crap while recognizing that something very important was happening then and there in the sunny Connecticut kitchen while Amanda played piano in the living room, recognizing that he was about to lose her because they could no longer talk together.
And sitting there with her, shining and new, recognized perhaps that Matthew Bridges was not a very special unique individual at all. Recognized the falseness of a man who shouted rebellion while slowly settling into a comfortable rut where there was really nothing against which to rebel. Who theorized and observed and complained about the culture, but who had nonetheless succumbed to it over the years, and was totally at ease within its confines, recognized this, and was shocked by the recognition. Matthew Bridges was a man who got up to catch the 8:04 each morning, and who read the Times and who voted without much interest and who went to the parties and the picnics and the dances and who devoted time to his wife in the evening and time to his children on Saturday and Sunday, and yet was losing his daughter this very minute, not to another person, but only because he could not talk to her. Or maybe had lost himself a long time ago in the morass of just doing the things that had to be done every single day of the week, like brushing his teeth, or taking Beverly for a walk, losing his own identity in a superficial uniform mass-identity where people spoke in shorthand and where it was important to be liked, but not at all important to be loved.
“It’s important,” he said flatly and harshly.
He wanted to run. In the stillness of the sunny kitchen with the March cold outside and the echo of his words, he wanted to run because the image of himself was suddenly frightening, an image indistinguishable from the countless others who caught their trains and mowed their lawns and lighted their cigarettes and held their cocktails and made love to their wives and had hopeless conversations with their daughters without being able to speak to them. He wanted to run anywhere out into the countryside because he knew he had once been Matthew Anson Bridges, a person in his own right, a very important individual, and that now he was not that person, but someone else — not even someone else, he was everyone else, he was faceless.
“Oh, Christ, Kate,” he said, “keep it!”
She stared at him in puzzlement, there was no communication. She thought he meant something quite different.
“I’d like to get on a train for Boston sometime,” he said.
She stared at her father because he no longer was making the slightest sense. She had already decided how she would handle Paul Marris — honestly and simply; no, she would not be his girl — but this was something else. She looked up at him in confusion and said, “What did you say, Daddy?”
“You know what love is?”
“I think I do.”
“Do you know what it is?” he said fiercely. “It’s accepting things you don’t really want, and giving away the things that mean the most to you.”
She did not answer him.
He thought, She doesn’t understand.
He thought, For Christ’s sake, Kate, your father is a shadow. I loved girls once, do you know that? I killed men once, do you know that? I raced across Connecticut with Amanda once, do you know that? Do you know what I did once, Kate, oh do you know the things I did once?
“Well,” he said, “you can take care of it. You’re a sensible girl, Kate.”
He wanted to run.
“You can handle Paul without hurting him.”
He wanted to be Matthew Anson Bridges.
“I’ve always been able to depend on you.”
He wanted suddenly to see Julia. He wanted someone to look at his face, to take his face between her hands and look at it very hard and then say, “Why, yes. It’s you.” He closed his eyes tight.
Why, yes, of course, it’s you.
April came in alive with plans. April always did. You had to do something in April, you had to burst outdoors in a sweater and suck air into your lungs, you had to leave the house and the winter behind, the season demanded it of you. And because life was suddenly sprouting everywhere around you, because there was visible evidence in everything you touched that the world was turning green again, because April had that magic sound in it, April, you could taste the word, you could sniff it, you could hold it in your arms and love it, because April brought with it the promise of sunshine and languid breezes and romance, it was a time for planning, a time for renewed hopefulness.
Julia Regan was going back to Italy.
There were clothes to buy, and she shopped the stores and studied the designers’ offerings with all the excitement of a young girl going to her first prom. She bought a Brigance walking skirt in taupe with a geometrically patterned matching top. She bought a Jane Derby afternoon dress in black silk surah. From Grès, for the evening, she bought a brown chiffon, and from Galanos a dark-blue print in Italian silk. At Lord & Taylor’s, she found a colorful Pucci silk-jersey print, which she purchased, amused because she was going to Italy where the dress originated, but not at all sure she could get it there. At Ohrbach’s she found two drip-dry cotton shirtwaists, one in madras and one in khaki. She bought impetuously, but with a practiced eye, two Acrilon knits, one in white and the other in black, two pairs of Belgian walking shoes from Henri Bendel, a woolen mohair stole in a burnished mustard, a coral-colored jersey raincoat that could double as a topper, a dark-green cotton suit from Jax with a matching scoop-necked dressy blouse and a striped tailored blouse, a pair of brown satin shoes and another pair dyed to match the blue Italian silk. She bought a simple black bathing suit, and a dozen nylons, and a pair of beige walking pumps with a stacked heel, and a traveling clock, and a cardigan sweater, and a large bottle of aspirin, and cleansing tissues, and paperback books for the plane trip. She bought no new jewelry, but she laid out her pearls and her scatter pins and bracelets, and a ruby pendant Arthur had given her when David was born, and a cameo she’d inherited from her mother, and tried to decide which she should take with her, if not all.