But then he praised whatever she did, no matter how silly it was. At Rye Beach, when she bit off the end of her waffle-pattern cone and started sucking the strawberry ice cream out through the hole, the way her mother couldn’t stand, and made as awful a noise as she could on purpose, her father didn’t mind. He just said, “Hey, that looks like fun. How do you do it?” And then he proved such a slow learner, so uproariously inept and messy, that Polly had to burst out laughing. It was years before it occurred to her that he must have been playing dumb on purpose to amuse her.
Her father took her to all kinds of weird places, often on jobs he was working at the moment. He wrote detective stories, and someday, he explained to Polly, he was going to be rich and famous, but right now he had to get by the best he could, and do whatever he could to keep body and soul together. Would they separate otherwise? Polly couldn’t help asking. “Well, sure; they might.” Polly knew he was kidding, but she couldn’t help imagining the soul part of her father drifting up into the air over Westchester and floating off sideways. It would look just like him, she imagined, with the same lumpy face and big brown eyes and untidy black hair, only sort of smoky and transparent like the ghosts in Saturday-morning movies.
Carl Alter took Polly to a junior high school where he was a substitute teacher, and to the offices of a magazine in Mount Vernon that printed pictures of naked ladies, and to the back part of the New Rochelle library, where worn books were rebound and there was a smell of glue and dust. When he was driving a taxi in White Plains he let her ride in the front seat with him. For a while he was working for the Fuller Brush Company, and drove around back streets selling brooms and mops and hairbrushes to ladies in three-decker wooden houses with pictures of Jesus over the sofa. Her father talked to them in an eager, grateful voice, not like his real one. They called him “young man,” and gave Polly things to eat and drink she wasn’t allowed at home: sticky fig newtons, and powdery pastel Nabisco wafers, and iced tea with wet gray sugar in the bottom of the glass. Carl Alter didn’t have Mommie’s rules about nourishing food, or about not talking to strangers or telling them personal things. (“Yep, ma’am, this big girl is my daughter, would you believe it? She just won a prize for the best Memorial Day poster in her class.”)
By the end of the afternoon Polly would be wholly lost. She would climb back into The Yellow Peril, slide across the broken straw stubble, and lean against her father as he drove back along Mamaroneck Avenue, feeling how large and solid and warm he was underneath the old cord jacket with the shiny leather patches on the elbows. When he spoke, she would turn up to him a face lit with the wide amazed smile that had always been her — and his — best feature.
But as they sat in their favorite booth in the coffee shop on Main Street, with a cherry Coke for Polly and a beer for Carl Alter, he would begin to shift about on the bench, to turn and look around the room. If he saw people he knew he would call and wave at them to come over. And even if he didn’t, he’d stop hearing what Polly was telling him. Soon, too soon, he would scoop his change from the wet wooden tabletop and tell her to drink up; he would say that her mother would be wondering where the hell she’d got to.
On the ride home her father would be almost silent, or whistling in a thin, tuneless way. He would gun the engine and stutter through yellow lights, as if he couldn’t wait to get there and be rid of Polly. When he stopped the car at the house he sometimes wouldn’t even go around to open the door for her — he would just reach across and yank on the pitted chrome handle. “So long, Polly-O, see you next week, same time,” he would say, but often that was a lie.
Once she had had some therapy, of course, Polly realized that she had still been in love with her father all those years, and furious at him for abandoning her, for forcing her to grow up in a family she didn’t belong in. She told herself that it was the chase, the effort of wooing, perhaps even the novelty of being refused, that had engaged Carl Alter’s attention. When he knew himself secure in his daughter’s love he became restive, in fact bored with her. Because that was how men were. They’d do anything to persuade you into caring for them, trusting them, giving up your independence, taking on what they used to call — not that most of them would dare use the phrase nowadays — “the feminine role.” And then once you were really caught, once you’d cut your options and were helpless and dependent, economically or emotionally or both, they disengaged as fast as they could.
With Elsa’s help Polly had slowly moved toward forgiving her father, at least intellectually, for the way he had behaved when she was a child. She had taught herself to remember that he wasn’t much more than a child himself — only twenty-two when she was born, an embarrassing six months after the hurried shotgun wedding of two college students who hardly knew each other. Polly was barely a year old when Carl Alter was drafted into the army, and it was two years after that before he came home to stay. Many young guys in his position, she had to admit, would have decided to forget that they had ever had a daughter.
But Polly still couldn’t forgive her father for the way he had behaved later on, after her mother married Bob Milner and they moved to Rochester. She couldn’t forgive him for not writing more often, or for coming to see her only twice a year, and sometimes not even that. Carl Alter was living in Boston then, but it wasn’t that far, she used to think, opening the atlas and running her finger across green Massachusetts and pink New York State. It wasn’t as if she were in Texas, or Alaska.
After a while Polly had decided she didn’t care whether her father came to Rochester or not. He was an embarrassment, anyhow, with his broken promises, his unsteady jobs, his unpressed clothes and his battered old cars (The Yellow Peril had died, but it was succeeded by vehicles of the same genus, The Black Death and The White Whale). She decided she was really glad when he went to work on a small-town newspaper in California, across a whole checkerboard of colored states, because she wouldn’t have to bother with him at all anymore.
By the time she reached high school Polly had realized that Carl Alter not only seldom came to see her, he never sent any money for her support. It used to make her furious that her mother wasn’t angry about this.
“I don’t see why you want me to write to him,” she had complained once. “I don’t see why you can even stand him, after the way he’s treated us.”
“Oh, well,” Bea Milner said, with her characteristic smiling sigh. “It’s not his fault, you know. Carl never had any money; probably never will.”
“It’s his fault that he married you and then deserted you,” Polly insisted.
“Oh no, darling. You mustn’t think that way. It was nobody’s fault. We were both so young, and we didn’t think about the future. Things happen, that’s all.”
Which was typical of how her mother’s mind worked, Polly thought as the bus ground its way through Columbus Circle. Bea Milner was a classic example of the unliberated woman. Men, and what men wanted, always had priority with her. When Bob Milner proposed to her she probably didn’t even ask herself what it would mean to her daughter, or mind that it would be the end of her own career. And, like the virtuous heroines of Victorian literature, she would not bear a grudge, especially against a man; she was infuriatingly forgiving. A college junior gets a freshman pregnant, so that she has to drop out of school to be married, and then he leaves her, and all the effort and expense of the next twenty years fall on her, and that’s just how Things Happen.