Day of Wrath (2 page)

But she went on as if she hadn't heard me. "I never wanted
a child," she said through her tears. "I never did! I was past thirty when
I met Tom. He was fifteen years older than I was. And . . . well, look
at me. I haven't had many suitors. I didn't think I wanted any. I had my
own apartment. A job. My parents. That seemed sufficient. But then I turned
thirty and my parents died and I was alone. A world that I thought was
impregnable began to collapse around me, and for the first time in my life
I needed help. So when Tom asked me to marry him, I said yes.

"It wasn't love," she said with distaste. "He was well
past fifty and in poor health. I just thought a few years with someone
I liked, years that would help me get over the loneliness. And I'm sure
he was simply looking for someone to take care of him. Which I did. Day
in and day out, for eleven years. We never planned on having a family of
our own."

She pulled a paper napkin out of a box on the table and
rubbed her eyes with it. "I told you I thought my life was catching up
with me," she said in a calmer voice. "Perhaps now you can see what I mean.
I've done my best for Robbie. I really have. Perhaps better than most mothers
would have been able to do. But there's always been something wrong between
us. For some time now, I've felt it would end like this—abruptly, violently."

"Why?" I said.."Why violently?"

"Robbie is short-tempered. Over the last two years she's
gone through puberty, and it's made her moody and introverted. Just this
week she broke a vase that my mother had given me. It took me three hours
to patch it back together. She's become a tyrant around the house. Always
breaking my things and shouting at me. That is, when she deigns to speak
at all. Adolescence is a kind of madness, I think. Most of the time she's
locked upstairs in her room, with that stereo blasting away. I've warned
her that the neighbors won't stand for it. Mr. Rostow has already begun
to give me odd looks; and we've lived together in harmony for nineteen
years.

Robbie doesn't care. She says I think too much about the
neighbors and too little about her. She says I don't understand her generation.
She says I don't understand anything." Mildred Segal looked down at the
speckled tile floor and said, "Sometimes I think she is right."

"When did she leave?"

"Four days ago. On Sunday afternoon. We had a fight about
a twenty-dollar bill she'd taken from my purse. Then she ran upstairs and
locked herself in her room and started playing that stereo as loudly as
she could. Instead of sitting there, like I usually do, and fuming, I went
out to shop. I was gone about two hours. When I got back at four-thirty,
she was gone. She didn't even leave a note. I spent Sunday evening waiting
for her to come home. And I stayed home Monday and Tuesday in case she
came back during the day."

I took my notebook out of my jacket, Hipped it open, and
studied the blue lines on a blank page. "You know she'll probably come
back on her own," I said, without looking at Mildred. "In a few days she'll
probably come back and you can patch it up with her."

"
Can't you see that I need to make an effort of some sort?"
the woman said. "A gesture.—So she'll know that I care."

But the gesture wasn't for Robbie's sake. I knew it and
so did Mildred. It was for Mr. Rostow and the nineteen years of neighborliness.
It was for Eastlawn Drive and its nervous air of respectability. It was
for the world at large, which in this deeply fugitive city prizes nothing
more than the show of propriety and the concealment of shame. And it was
a little bit for Mildred herself, who had never wanted a child and who
was now facing what she thought was the guilty consequence of her own selfishness.
Which was just another kind of selfishness, of course. But an understandable
kind.

I could have told her that her ambivalence toward Robbie
was perfectly normal, that adolescence is a kind of madness, that these
things happened every day, and that she didn't have to spend a small fortune
to prove that she and Robbie were an exceptional case. I could have told
her that, but I didn't. First of all, because she didn't want to hear it—didn't
want to be told that she was no different than any other stiff-necked parent
with a rebellious teenager on her hands. And second, because she wouldn't
have understood me if I had said it. It went against the received wisdom
of Eastlawn Drive, which said that mothers and daughters must always love
one another or, at least, act as if they loved one another, every minute
of every day. And that any deviation from that standard was cause for shame.
And third, because there was always the chance, remote as it seemed at
that moment, that her daughter had run straight into trouble.

So I dug a stub of a pencil out of my pocket and began
to ask the usual questions. "Do you have any idea where Robbie might have
gone?"

"Not the slightest."

"She has no special friends? Boy friends?" _

"Well, there's the Caldwell boy," Mildred said distastefully.
"Bobby Caldwell. They live on the other side of Eastlawn, across Losantiville
near the park. And there's Sylvia Rostow. She lives next door." Mildred's
eyes brightened. "She's such a nice girl. I just wish that Robbie could
be more like her."

I felt a chill run down my spine. When I was a boy, growing
up in a neighborhood very much like this one, my mother had periodically
compared me to the son of a neighbor—a swarthy, pepper-haired, mealy-mouthed
kid, who had a genius for pleasing adults. I wrote down Sylvia Rostow's
name with an asterisk beside it—to remind me that I wouldn't like her.

"Did Robbie take anything with her when she left?" I asked.
"Clothes? Food? More money?"\

"No. She didn't take any food or money. I'm not entirely
sure about the clothes. I haven't searched her room. If she should come
back and found that I'd gone through her things . .

"Maybe we better take a look,"
I said.

At first glance the bedroom didn't tell me anything new
about Robbie Segal. Like the rest of the house it was a reflection of the
mother rather than of the child—a middle-aged, middle-class dream of
adolescence. The four-poster bed was all ruffles and white lace. The furniture—a
dresser, vanity table, bedstand, rocking chair—was painted white with
gold trim. The carpet was the same pale, fluffy, unreal pelt of blue that
you occasionally see on stuffed animals. There were two framed photographs
on the vanity table—mom and dad.

It wasn't until I actually stepped into the room—Mildred
hovering nervously at my side—that I began to see how wrong everything
looked. There wasn't a piece of loose clothing or a book or a record jacket
anywhere in sight. The bed had been newly made. The carpet was spotless.
Even the stereo on the bedstand had been dusted off and covered with its
plastic lid. Either Robbie was an extremely neat young runaway or Mildred
hadn't been telling me the truth when she'd said that she'd left Hobbie's
things untouched.

She must have sensed what I was thinking because she tapped
me on the arm and said, in a slightly disingenuous voice, "I did do a little
cleaning up. After all, with company coming out.

"Mildred," I said. "I'm not company. I'm a private detective.
You're paying me money to be here."

"Yes, of course," she said stiH€ly. "I just picked up
a few things."

"Like what?"

"A few of Robbie's things. Nothing important."

I glanced around the room again. It wasn't simply clean;
it was denuded, like a hospital room. There weren't any personal items—no
posters, no teddy bears, no music boxes, no postcards—none of the paraphernalia
that any teenager would surround herself with. It gave me the eerie feeling
that no one had ever lived there at all.

"What did you do with them, Mildred?" I said.

"With what?" she said innocently.

"All of Robbie's things."

"I can't see where cleaning up a few—"

"Look," I said impatiently, "either you show me what Robbie
left behind, or you get another detective. I don't have time to play these
games with you."

"Well, really!" she said indignantly and marched over
to a closet. She opened the sliding door, bent down, picked up a large
cardboard box, then marched back to me. "I'm going downstairs," she said
icily. "After all, this is still my house and I can come and go as I please.
But I want you to know that I don't like your tone of voice. And I also
know that all of this junk"—she thrust the box at me—"was given to
Robbie by her so-called friends. I don't understand what kind of distorted
impression you want to get of Robbie's home life, but that junk won't tell
you a thing about the way I've raised my daughter?

"I'll bear that in mind," I said.

She turned on her heels and walked out of the room. I
went over to the bed, put the box on the mattress, and began to sort through
the contents. It was like breaking into Pharoah's tomb. Mildred Segal had
boxed up her daughter's entire life—everything that Robbie cared for—and
stuck it in a closet, safely out of my way. There was a pair of granny
glasses with yellow plastic lenses. A gold bracelet with the initials "R.C."
on the shank. A necklace with a peace symbol emblem. A black T-shirt with
Pentangle printed in silvery letters across the breast. A paperback copy
of Gurdjieff's
Conversations with Famous People
. A paperback copy
of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
. A Frederick's
of Hollywood catalogue. A ceramic hash pipe that had never been used. An
unopened box of Zig-zag papers. Strawberry incense sticks. A bottle of
patchouli oil. A snapshot of a pretty blonde girl in shorts and halter
top.

There was a good deal more. But it was all just as innocuous
and just as indicative of the kind of life that Robbie Segal had been trying
to live in that big, white pillow of a room. It took a perverse imagination
to see anything more than a normal teenager's normal adventurousness in
any of it. I studied the snapshot and wondered if it was a picture of Robbie.
If so, she was a beautiful kid, with long blonde hair and sad blue eyes
and a crooked, engaging smile. There was a tenderness and a vulnerability
about that face that moved me; but since I'd inched closer to forty, most
young faces moved me in the same way.

And, suddenly, I wanted to find Robbie Segal. Not for
her mother, with all her guilts and proprieties. Not even for Robbie's
own sake. But for me. For the opportunity to tell her that the world of
Eastlawn Drive was not without end. The feeling only lasted a moment, after
which I began to feel foolishly adolescent myself. I knew perfectly well
that, like it or not, the girl would have to be brought back home—back
to that world without end—and that any sentimental speech about freedom
and conformity would sound worse than a lie coming from the man who was
taking her back to Mildred. And, at the same time, I knew that I'd probably
go ahead and make that speech, if I did find her. To give her what little
comfort I could and, perhaps, to console myself for the false positions
that life is always forcing us into.
 

I FOUND MILDRED SITTING IN THE KITCHEN, STRAIGHT in her
chair—her hands flat on the table, her face unfocused and full of grief.
She'd been crying again. Her eyelids were puffy and rimmed with red, and
her nose was a little damp at the nostrils. When I sat down across from
her, she drew her hands back from the tabletop, like a pianist who'd just
finished a piece, and folded them in her lap. Her big green eyes looked
so vacant, her long, drawn-out face looked so bereft of hope, that I felt
a part of me relent—again. Charity, Harry, I reminded myself. Charity.

"I'm sorry I snapped at you, Mildred," I said.

"That's all right," she said in a forlorn voice. "I deserved
it. Imagine putting a clean room before my daughter's safety! I shouldn't
have been allowed to have a child."

It sounded like something she'd heard in a movie. A good
deal of her conversation did, which is usually the case with people who
have no talent for intimacy. I told her, "It's just not that bad."

She shook her head and bit her lip and her green eyes
welled with tears. "I don't understand people. Not children or adults.
I've tried so hard to please them—to keep everything neat and orderly
and livable. But I always end up looking hateful and ridiculous."

I pulled a fresh handkerchief out of my pocket and handed
it to her.

"Thanks," she smiled.

"Maybe if you didn't try quite so hard to please," I said
gently.

"
I can't help it!" she sobbed and threw her hands up in
distress. "I don't know any other way to be."

"I guess not." I stared at her and thought, all fates
are worse than death, Harry. It was just Mildred's bad fortune to have
been born into aa world she could never quite tidy up. I patted her on
the shoulder and said, "If we're going to avoid these fallings-out, maybe
we'd both better be a little more patient with each other."

She nodded heavily and tried to smile.

"I found this photograph in the box," I said, handing
her the snapshot of the blonde girl. "Is this Robbie?"

She nodded a second time and her smile blossomed with
affection. "She's so beautiful, isn't she? It's a miracle she's mine."