A Fine and Private Place

uniform.

“How can I let that happen, Peter? He is my father, the only one I’ll ever have. In his own cockeyed way he loves me. Anyway, we couldn’t build a life on a foundation like that. I know I couldn’t, and I don’t believe you could, either.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Peter said crassly. “What’s the matter with that crazy old man of yours? Why the hell doesn’t he start seeing a psychiatrist? Doesn’t he realize he’s ruining your life?”

“He’s a compulsive gambler, Peter.”

“And womanizer-let’s not forget that. Virgin, your father is a compulsive everything.” Peter’s been calling me Virgin in private for some time now, how aptly he hasn’t known. It makes me writhe. “You say he loves you. It’s a hell of a love that makes a father sell his only daughter to a-a eunuch just to save his own miserable hide!”

“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