Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [19]
Now properly fortified, Mom popped the question. “Are you sleeping together, dear?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“We’re lying together and we want to, and we don’t want to. We kind of do and we kind of don’t. We’re going crazy. Cripes.”
Mother’s glass lowered a full inch and her eyes became slightly watery as the whiskey hit its mark.
“What next?”
“I want you to like him.”
“You intend to marry this boy, don’t you?”
I shrugged.
“The Admiral and I have discovered that young people are absolutely certain of their emotions and convictions. They’re also bullheaded and deaf. I take it we’re not being consulted, only informed.”
“I’ll listen,” I said.
“Gideon is extremely ambitious and he could be talented. I’m not a proper judge of that. I read his pages last night. They’re very crude. It takes years and years to become a writer. This boy hasn’t graduated from high school. He can’t get into college. He hasn’t got a chance in hell of becoming a novelist with that background.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. He has a better chance of swimming across the Pacific. I suppose in time we’ll learn to live with a Jewish son-in-law. But neither the Admiral nor I will accept your unhappiness.”
I felt a sudden rage! “Mom, that’s a damned laugh. Neither one of you have known I’ve been alive for the last ten years. All right, so he doesn’t become a writer. I love him for dreaming about it. For daring it. Whatever, he’ll make a good living. I want him for the way he loves me ... for the way he touches me.”
Mother just stared at me, as though she had been struck.
“I need him for his tenderness,” I said.
She twiddled with her glass, spinning the ice cubes around, then held it out quickly as the waiter passed. She had been caught off guard. Darling Val never argued with either of them.
“That’s very unkind,” she said.
“All right, Mom. When was the last time the Admiral was tender to you?”
“Oh, don’t you know, darling, he and I have had our wild nights in the Orient. He knows his way around my body. Why the hell is it that all young people can’t believe their parents ever made love to each other?”
“Me,” I said, not believing the words were coming from my mouth. “What about loving me?”
“Great men have great weaknesses,” she answered. “No, don’t interrupt me, Valerie. Your father is an honorable man and a patriot. He’s one of the greatest in the world at what he does. And I don’t believe he’s ever been unfaithful to me in over thirty years. Perhaps I gave him too much and you too little. Families of men like these always have to pay a price. Do you really think your young man, Gideon, is all that much different from your father? I said don’t interrupt me, Val. ... The Admiral never got a word of love from his own father in his entire life. He doesn’t know how to say ‘I love you.’ But he does love, in his own way, and God knows I do. This man—your father—when he stands on the bridge of his flagship, a battle wagon, and puts a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he sees ships from horizon to horizon. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, planes overhead, submarines below. He, Bulldog Ballard, is the commander! What can I, as a wife, give him to compare? Just keep him fit and understand his weaknesses and love him for what he is.”
“Things are different with me and Gideon. The world is becoming different. This is going to be a two-career family. The minute he earns enough by writing, we’re off to Paris for me to finish my schooling.”
“Oh, Val, my darling, do you really believe that Gideon doesn’t have the same kind of ambition as your father? Do you really believe that you can match him if he starts to fly? To be on the bridge of that ship, he must have peace in his home. Maybe there is a brave new world beginning. I hear talk of it all the time, but I don’t understand it. I’m just a plain old Navy wife. My career is my man and that’s been more