The Stand

She glanced at her father to see how he was taking this. He simply nodded for her to go on.

“Anyway, I had to get out of there. I mean I really had to. And Jesse was furious with me. I’m sure he had a right to be mad… it was a childish thing to do, a childish way to feel, I’m sure… but that’s the way I often am. Not always. I can get a job done—”

“Yes, you can.”

“But sometimes—”

“Sometimes King Laugh knocks and you’re one of those people who can’t keep him out,” Peter said.

“I guess I must be. Anyway, Jess isn’t one of those people. And if we were married… he’d keep coming home to that unwanted guest that I had let in. Not every day, but often enough to make him mad. Then I’d try, and… and I guess…”

“I guess you’d be unhappy,” Peter said, hugging her tighter against his side.

“I guess I would,” she said.

“Don’t let your mother change your mind, then.”

She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.

“What do you think of me getting an abortion?” she asked after a while.

“My guess is that’s really what you wanted to talk about.”

She looked at him, startled.

He looked back, half-quizzical, half-smiling, one bushy eyebrow—the left—cocked. Yet the overall impression she took from him was one of great gravity.

“Maybe that’s true,” she said slowly.

“Listen,” he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.

“Fra

He looked at her thoughtfully in the dusklight.

“Carla was different in those days. She was… oh, hellfire, she was young herself, for one thing. She didn’t change until your brother Freddy died. Until then, she was young. She stopped growing after Freddy died. That… you mustn’t think I’m talking against your mother, Fra

“What was she like, Daddy?”

“Why…” He looked vaguely out across the garden. “She was a lot like you, Fra

“Mamma… drank beer?”

“Yes, she did. And she’d spend most of the ninth in the ladies’ and come out cussing me for making her miss the best part of the game when all the time it was she tellin me to go on down to the concession stand and get em.”

Fra

“She never kindled,” he said, bemused. “We went to a doctor, she and I, to see which of us was wrong. The doctor said neither one. Then, in ‘60, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. Fred was her father’s name, you know. She had a miscarriage in ‘65, and we both figured that was the end of it. Then you came along in ‘69, a month early but just fine. And I just about loved you to death. We each had one of our own. But she lost hers.”

He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1973. He had been thirteen, Fra

“I think abortion’s too clean a name for it,” Peter Goldsmith said. His lips moved slowly over each word, as if they pained him. “I think it’s infanticide, pure and simple. I’m sorry to say so, to be so… inflexible, set, whatever it is I’m being… about something which you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it. I told you I was an old man.”

“You’re not old, Daddy,” she murmured.

“I am, I am!” he said roughly. He looked suddenly distraught. “I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table ma

“I don’t want an abortion,” she said quietly. “For my own reasons.”

“What are they?”

“The baby is partly me,” she said, lifting her chin slightly. “If that’s ego, I don’t care.”

“Will you give it up, Fra

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

“No. I want to keep it.”

He was silent. She thought she felt his disapproval.

“You’re thinking of school, aren’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, standing up. He put his hands in the small of his back and grimaced pleasurably as his spine crackled. “I was thinking we’ve talked enough. And that you don’t have to make that decision just yet.”

“Mom’s home,” she said.

He turned to follow her gaze as the station wagon turned into the drive, the chrome winking in the day’s last light. Carla saw them, beeped the horn, and waved cheerily.

“I have to tell her,” Fra

“Yes. But give it a day or two, Fra

“All right.”

She helped him pick up the gardening tools and then they walked up toward the station wagon together.