"No," she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn't trust Jesse, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts. "Jesse means well. He wants to do the right thing; he really does. But... we went to a poetry reading two semesters ago. It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly... very carefully... so as not to miss a word. And me... you know me..."
He put a comfortable arm around her and said, "Frannie got the giggles."
"Yeah. That's right. I guess you know me pretty well."
"I know a little," he said.
"They - the giggles, I mean - just came out of nowhere. I kept thinking, 'The scruffy man, the scruffy man, we all came to listen to the scruffy man.' It had a beat, like a song you might hear on the radio. And I got the giggles. I didn't mean to. It really didn't have anything to do with Mr. Enslin's poetry; it was pretty good, or even with the way he looked. It was the way they were looking at him."
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.
"Frannie, you've no business having such an old man for a father, but I can't help it. I never married until 1956."
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, Frannie, even if it sounds a little like I am. But it seems to me that Carla stopped... growing... after Freddy died. She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick-dry cement on her way of looking at things and called it good. Now she's like a guard in a museum, and if she sees anyone tampering with the ideas on display there, she gives them a lot of look-out-below. But she wasn't always like that. You'll just have to take my word for it, but she wasn't."
"What was she like, Daddy?"
"Why..." He looked vaguely out across the garden. "She was a lot like you, Frannie. She got the giggles. We used to go down to Boston to see the Red Sox play and during the seventh-inning stretch she'd go out with me to the concession and have a beer."
"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."
Frannie tried to imagine her mother with a cup of Narragansett beer in one hand, looking up at her father and laughing, like a girl on a date. She simply couldn't do it.
"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, Frannie four. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.
"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."