The Stand:BOOK I(23)

"Oh-Frannie," her mother said, her words coming very quick. She laid a hand against the side of her cheek like an offended maiden aunt. "How-did-it-happen?"

It was Jesse's question. That was what really pissed her off; it was the same question he had asked.

"Since you had two kids yourself, Mother, I think you know how it happened."

"Don't be smart!" Carla cried. Her eyes opened wide and flashed the hot fire that had always terrified Frannie as a child. She was on her feet in the quick way she had (and that had also terrified her as a child), a tall woman with graying hair which was nicely upswept and tipped and generally beauty-shopped, a tall woman in a smart green dress and faultless beige hose. She went to the mantelpiece, where she always went in moments of distress. Resting there, below the flintlock, was a large scrapbook. Carla was something of an amateur genealogist, and her entire family was in that book …  at least, as far back as 1638, when its earliest traceable progenitor had risen out of the nameless crowd of Londoners long enough to be recorded in some very old church records as Merton Downs, Freemason. Her family tree had been published four years ago in The New England Genealogist, with Carla herself the compiler of record.

Now she fingered that book of painstakingly amassed names, a safe ground where none could trespass. Were there no thieves in there anyplace? Frannie wondered. No alcoholics? No unwed mothers?

"How could you do something like this to your father and me?" she asked finally. "Was it that boy Jesse?"

"It was Jesse. Jesse's the father."

Carla flinched at the word.

"How could you do it?" Carla repeated. "We did our best to bring you up in the right way. This is just-just-"

She put her hands to her face and began to weep.

"How could you do it?" she cried. "After all we've done for you, this is the thanks we get? For you to go out and …  and …  rut with a boy like a bitch in heat? You bad girl! You bad girl!"

She dissolved into sobs, leaning against the mantelpiece for support, one hand over her eyes, the other continuing to slip back and forth over the green cloth cover of the scrapbook. Meantime, the grandfather clock went on ticking.

"Mother-"

"Don't talk to me! You've said enough!"

Frannie stood up stiffly. Her legs felt like wood but must not be, because they were trembling. Tears were beginning to leak out of her own eyes, but let them; she would not let this room defeat her again. "I'll be going now."

"You ate at our table!" Carla cried at her suddenly. "We loved you …  and supported you …  and this is what we get for it! Bad girl! Bad girl!"

Frannie, blinded by tears, stumbled. Her right foot struck her left ankle. She lost her balance and fell down with her hands splayed out. She knocked the side of her head against the coffee table and one hand sent a vase of flowers pitching onto the rug. It didn't break but water gurgled out, turning dove gray to slate gray.

"Look at that!" Carla screamed, almost in triumph. The tears had put black hollows under her eyes and cut courses through her makeup. She looked haggard and half-mad. "Look at that, you've spoiled the rug, your grandmother's rug-"

She sat on the floor, dazedly rubbing her head, still crying, wanting to tell her mother that it was only water, but she was completely unnerved now, and not really sure. Was it only water? Or was it urine? Which?

Again moving with that spooky quickness, Carla Goldsmith snatched the vase up and brandished it at Frannie. "What's your next move, miss? Are you planning to stay right here? Are you expecting us to feed you and board you while you sport yourself all around town? That's it, I suppose. Well, no! No! I won't have it. I will not have it! "

"I don't want to stay here," Frannie muttered. "Did you think I would?"

"Where are you going to go? With him? I doubt it."

"Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose." Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well. "Not that it's any business of yours."

"No business of mine?" Carla echoed, still holding the vase. Her face was parchment white. "No business of mine? What you do when you're under my roof is no business of mine? You ungrateful little bitch!"

She slapped Frannie, and slapped her hard. Frannie's head rocked back. She stopped rubbing her head and started rubbing her cheek, looking unbelievingly at her mother.

"This is the thanks we get for seeing you into a nice school," Carla said, showing her teeth in a merciless and frightful grin. "Now you'll never finish. After you marry him-"

"I'm not going to marry him. And I'm not going to quit school."

Carla's eyes widened. She stared at Frannie as if Frannie had lost her mind. "What are you talking about? An abortion? Having an abortion? You want to be a murderer as well as a tramp?"

"I'm going to have the child. I'll have to take the spring semester off, but I can finish next summer."

"What do you think you're going to finish on? My money? If that's it, you've got a lot more thinking to do. A modern girl like you hardly needs support from her parents, does she?"

"Support I could use," Frannie said softly. "The money …  well, I'll get by."

"There's not a bit of shame in you! Not a single thought for anyone but yourself!" Carla shouted. "My God, what this is going to do to your father and me! But you don't care a bit! It will break your father's heart, and-"

"It don't feel so broken." Peter Goldsmith's calm voice came from the doorway, and they both swung around. In the doorway he was, but far back in it; the toes of his workboots stopped just short of the place where the parlor carpet took over from the shabbier one in the hallway. Frannie realized suddenly that it was a place she had seen him in a great many times before. When had he last actually been in the parlor? She couldn't remember.

"What are you doing here?" Carla snapped, suddenly unmindful of any structural damage her husband's heart might have sustained. "I thought you were working late this afternoon."

"I switched off with Harry Masters," Peter said. "Fran's already told me, Carla. We are going to be grandparents."

"Grandparents! " she shrieked. An ugly, confused sort of laughter jarred out of her. "You leave this to me. She told you first and you kept it from me. All right. It's what I've come to expect of you. But now I'm going to close the door and the two of us are going to thrash this out."

She smiled with glittery bitterness at Frannie.

"Just …  we ‘girls.'"

She put her hand on the knob of the parlor door and began to swing it closed. Frannie watched, still dazed, hardly able to comprehend her mother's sudden gush of fury and vitriol.

Peter put his hand out slowly, reluctantly, and stopped the door halfway through its swing.

"Peter, I want you to leave this to me."

"I know you do. I have in the past. But not this time, Carla."

"This is not your province."

Calmly, he replied: "It is."

"Daddy-"

Carla turned on her, the parchment white of her face now tattooed red over the cheekbones. "Don't you speak to him! " she screamed. "He's not the one you're dealing with! I know you could always wheedle him around to any crazy idea you had or sweet-talk him into taking your side no matter what you did, but he is not the one you're dealing with today, miss! "

"Stop it, Carla."

"Get out! "

"I'm not in. You can see th-"

"Don't you make fun of me! Get out of my parlor! "

And with that she began to push the door, lowering her head and getting her shoulders into it until she looked like some strange bull, both human and female. He held her back easily at first, then with more effort. At last the cords stood out on his neck, although she was a woman and seventy pounds lighter than he.

Frannie wanted to scream at them to stop it, to tell her father to go away so the two of them wouldn't have to look at Carla like this, at the sudden and irrational bitterness that had always seemed to threaten but which had now swept her up. But her mouth was frozen, its hinges seemingly rusted shut.

"Get out! Get out of my parlor! Out! Out! Out! You bastard, let go of the goddamned door and GET OUT! "

That was when he slapped her.

It was a flat, almost unimportant sound. The grandfather clock did not fly into outraged dust at the sound, but went on ticking just as it had ever since it was set going. The furniture did not groan. But Carla's raging words were cut off as if amputated with a scalpel. She fell on her knees and the door swung all the way open to bang softly against a high-backed Victorian chair with a hand-embroidered slipcover.

"No, oh no," Frannie said in a hurt little voice.

Carla pressed a hand to her cheek and stared up at her husband.

"You have had that coming for ten years or better," Peter remarked. His voice had a slight unsteadiness in it. "I always told myself I didn't do it because I don't hold with hitting women. I still don't. But when a person-man or woman-turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off. I only wish, Carla, I'd had the guts to do it sooner. ‘Twould have hurt us both less."