The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [13]
The play was The Crucible, and Peter was familiar enough with it to pick up the overall rhythm early in the first act. He found it an easy show to work. There was a predictable ebb and flow to Miller’s treatment of the Salem witch trials, and before long he was handling the board automatically, keeping on top of it with most of his mind free for other concerns.
He would have preferred it if the evening’s work had been more demanding. The thoughts that came to mind were not ones he welcomed.
“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”
Did she know, did she have the slightest idea, how he itched to get out of there? He doubted it. She raised the question often enough, had brought it up even during the good times. “I’m too old for you, Petey. Jesus, you don’t need a mother that much. The Oedipus bit is fun but it has to drag you down sooner or later. You ought to be out there in the world with some sweet young thing with firm little tits and a nice tight cunt. What do you want with an old bag? I mean, for God’s fucking sake, Petey—”
It would be so much easier if Robin were his own daughter. If that were the case he knew precisely what he would do. He would pick up the kid and get the hell out. You could do that, if you were the kid’s real father and the mother was as completely incapable as Gretchen was.
And he could even have done it with a treasonably clear conscience. Gretchen could not be worse off without the child to care for. Robin was a responsibility at a time when the woman could barely handle the responsibility of putting on her own shoes when she got out of bed in the morning. Gretchen was falling apart, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to put her back together again. Sometimes he thought no once could, that she was doomed to burn herself out no matter what anyone tried to do to help her. Other times he was fairly sure he did her some good, gave her something however frail to lean on, did her some service by walking along behind her and picking up what she dropped.
And still other times he wondered if he might not be bad for her, as she was bad for him, wondered if his presence was not partially responsible for what was happening to her.
“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”
Because of the kid, you silly bitch. Did she realize that? It seemed that she must, but when she was in a bad way she was scarcely aware of Robin’s existence. Gretchen had failed to feed Robin—and often failed to feed her—not out of any malice but simply because she hardly knew Robin was there. She was locked too tightly into her own self to waste any thought on Robin.
Such a sweet child. Such a sweet perfect beautiful child, and how exciting it was to have a child who thought you were the most important person in the world, and if she were only his kid, God, if she were only his kid—
But she wasn’t, any more than she was Harold Vann’s. Vann had still been married to Gretchen when Robin was born, but had moved out long before the conception. Robin’s father could have been any of a few dozen men. According to Gretchen’s calculations, the girl had most likely been conceived during a two-week stay in Miami Beach, during which time she had sexual relations with a great number of total strangers, men whose names she never knew and whose faces she could not have identified.
“It’s funny I got pregnant that trip,” she told Peter once. “I seem to remember blowing most of them. Obviously there must have been some that I fucked. Either that or the kid’s the world’s first oral conception.”
She was very nearly born by the world’s first oral delivery. Gretchen was nauseated throughout nine months of pregnancy. She had had several abortions before, and wondered aloud during the late stages of pregnancy why she had not had another one this time. “I’m already sick to my stomach with this kid,” she said, “and the little bastard’s not even born yet.”
That Robin was not literally a little bastard was the result of Harold Vann’s benevolence. He had