John D. MacDonald
The Unsuitable Girl
“You’re not even listening!” Marian said, with indignation that sounded to her husband to be dangerously close to tears.
Thomas Winslow straightened up and racked the fire tongs and went back to his chair. “Of course I’m listening, dear.”
“Tommy is only seventeen. That woman keeps coming here and picking him up in that flashy little car, and phoning him... It seems terribly unhealthy to me, and I think we should do something about it.”
“Now, Marian,” he said soothingly. “The girl’s only twenty, and Tommy does look older than seventeen.”
“But she isn’t the proper sort of girl. A nice girl wouldn’t sit out in front and blow that ridiculous horn for him to come running out.”
“Now, Marian,” he said.
“We must do something. He isn’t himself. He positively slinks about the house. He’s almost surly. He’s just a high-school boy. That woman could ruin his life!”
Thomas Winslow looked at his wife with fondness and helplessness. He knew the futility of trying to explain to Marian his firm belief that it would work out. Once a child had been raised in a sound emotional climate, all you could do was wait and hope and pray he would make an equivalently good emotional relationship. It was one of the calculated risks you took when you had children. If you tried to force and coerce and manipulate, you could very well force a spirited child into a bad relationship.
“You just sit there,” Marian said. “I’m going to do something. I’m going to ask him to invite this Pamela person to the club to have dinner with us on Saturday night.”
Thomas looked at his wife with alarm. He knew what was on her mind: a not very subtle attempt to emphasize the difference between the rather garish Pamela and the sort of people young Tommy was used to.
He tried to prevent it. “If we just leave him alone, dear, everything will work out. I admit she’s a flashy young woman, and I suppose she is exciting and glamorous to Tommy because she’s older. He’ll work it out himself.”
But Marian was deaf to his reasoning. After the argument was lost and she had gone to bed, Thomas remembered an incident in his own past. The girl had been a clerk at a perfume counter. The day’s labor had always clung to her with its myriad musks and fragrances. It had taken many weeks for him to become disconcertedly aware of the little things about her — the slightly grubby knuckles, the hearty chomp on the cud of gum, the run-over heels. Yet, before the magic had faded...
It was a precarious time in Tommy’s life, this time of Pamela, Thomas thought.
On Wednesday night as the four of them — Thomas, Marian, Tommy and twelve-year-old Ruth — were having dinner, Marian said silkily, with a warning glance at her husband. “Tommy, your father and I think it would be nice if we got to know Pamela better. We’ve hardly had a chance to speak to her. So I’ve arranged for a table at the club for Saturday night. The dinner dance. Just the four of us. Won’t that be nice?”
Tommy concentrated on mashed potatoes for a few moments. “Well, I guess I’ll ask her. But she doesn’t like clubs. And I don’t think she’ll go for the family-circle kick.”
“I don’t see how she can very well refuse,” Marian said primly.
“Hah!” said Tommy.
“What is that supposed to mean, son?” Thomas asked.
“I’m sorry. It means that Pam doesn’t do anything she doesn’t feel like doing. She’s a free spirit.”
“Did she tell you so herself?” Marian asked.
“Why do you have to all the time be gunning for her, Mom?” Tommy asked, crossly.
“Don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice,” Thomas said.
Tommy mumbled an apology and said again that he’d ask her but he didn’t think she’d want to go. Later, when Tommy was doing homework in his room, they heard the familiar beebeep of Pamela’s car horn. Tommy bounded down the stairs. He was gone before Thomas could tell him not to be too late.
“She’ll be too sly to come,” Marian said grimly. “I know that type.”
The next morning at breakfast Tommy said, enormously casual. “By the way, Pam can’t make it Saturday night. She says thanks anyway.”
The next five days in the Winslow household were glum. Thomas was worried; seemed to have somehow lost touch with his son. He had confidence in Tommy’s essential goodness, but seventeen was an odd age, a volatile, erratic age to be. And there was a streak of stubborn pride in the boy.
Yet on the following Thursday night Marian met her husband at the door with a lusty kiss and a sealed-beam smile. “Darling, it worked! Even if Pamela didn’t come to the club, it started Tommy thinking. You know, comparing her in his mind. Now be knows that she doesn’t stack up. He’s going out with that nice little Rogers girl tomorrow night. And he’s more like himself already!”
“I’m glad,” Thomas said.
“You didn’t want to do anything. But that girl cut her own throat by turning down the invitation.”
Later that same evening as Thomas was going to bed he heard, as he passed Tommy’s room, the sound of muted music. It was good to hear the records again after a long silence. On impulse he tapped at the door. “Come in,” Tommy called.
Thomas went in and stood by the window and listened to the rest of the record. Tommy, in his pajamas, was stretched across the bed.
“Who is that?”
“Brubeck. And that’s real piano.”
Thomas sensed the faint strain in the air. “What’s with you and Pamela?” he asked, as casually as he could.
“Completely kaput, Dad. It was getting tiresome. She’s okay, I guess. But giving up that little wagon of hers was the real jolt.” His son’s voice was as casual as his own had been.
“You don’t think she would have fitted in so well at the club last Saturday?”
“You’ve been listening to Mom. It was fading before that. I don’t know. You ever feel this way — like you can outgrow people?”
“That can happen. But you don’t outgrow the people whose limitations are — the same as your own.”
Tommy nodded gravely. “Maybe you learn a little, though.”
“Front a few, sure. Too many of the same type and it gets repetitious. Then you don’t learn any more.”
Tommy gave him a quick and searching glance and then reached for the next record on the stack. The glance had been keen, knowing. The gesture was one that made further conversation impossible. For a brief moment Thomas Winslow felt desperately old. This, too, was part of growing up. And sometimes growing up seemed merely to be a process of carefully selecting the mask you would wear the rest of your life.
The boy had moved a bit farther away from them, had taken a few more steps into that land of personal experience and evaluation that would one day, if he were lucky, make him an adult. He was no longer a child. He walked across a wide and treacherous land.
As Tommy put the record on the spindle he said, “I guess Mom better think she had a hand in clobbering it.”
“Good idea,” Thomas said gravely, proudly, warmed by this new relationship with his son.
“This is more Brubeck. Listen close to the introduction.”
