While the father indicated and accepted a strawberry tart the son leaned forward.
“Do you have a name for this—this—” He stopped and flushed.
“Bastard?”
“No!”
“You were going to say ‘bastard.’ Say it.”
“Bastard.”
“There, feel better? Yes, I have a name! Maximilian—”
“Maximilian!?”
“Max. My son Max. God, that sounds good, don’t you agree? A name like that? Royalty. It has a regal sound. Max, my son.”
“And will he move into my room when I move out?”
“Are you moving out? No need. I wouldn’t dream of burdening your mama. Besides, my secretary is pleased to be a mother and looks forward to eighteen or twenty years of work and play with the child. I will visit him, of course, and take him out six or seven times a week, so he has a proper father.”
There was a still longer silence as coffee was placed on the table.
“Well, Mother,” said Ronald, “aren’t you going to say something?”
“Yes.” The mother frowned and then said, “I’ll be Goddamned.”
This time it was the son who plunged out of the restaurant. He sailed out, a trim ship in a high wind, his beautiful nose prowing the air. His mother ran after.
The father stayed, maundering over the bill, then, with some leisure, finished the last of the wine, rose, and walked past me. He stopped with his back to me. At first I didn’t think he was speaking to me, but then he repeated his question: “You read lips, don’t you?”
“What?”
I turned and he looked at me with steady gray eyes.
“Raised in a family of deaf-mutes?”
“Sort of,” I admitted uneasily.
“It’s all right. You a writer?”
“How did you guess?”
“Anyone that watches lips that closely has got to be something. It was quite a story, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t catch it all,” I lied.
The father laughed quietly and nodded. “Yes, you did. But it’s okay. None of it’s true.”
I almost dropped my dessert spoon. “What!?”
“I had to think of something. I suppose it’s been collecting up all year. All of a sudden, tonight, bam! You going to write it down when you get home?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. But—”
“But what?”
I swallowed with difficulty. “I—I just wish it were true.”
The father pulled a cigar out of his pocket, looked at it, found a lighter, lit it, smoked a big puff out on the air, and looked at the elusive stuff shaping and reshaping itself and blowing away into nothing. His eyes were watchful and growing wet, with all this.
“So do I, son,” he said, and walked away. “So do I.”
After a long moment I ordered another bottle of wine. When it was opened and poured, the waiter said, “Think you can finish that much?”
“I’m going to try,” I said. “Let me try.”
Tne end
