"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."
"Daddy - "
"Hush, Frannie," he said with absent sternness, and she hushed.
"You say she's being selfish," Peter said, still looking down into his wife's still, shocked face. "You're the one doing that. You stopped caring about Frannie when Fred died. That was when you decided caring hurt too much and decided it'd be safer just to live for yourself. And this is where you came to do that, time and time and time again. This room. You doted on your dead family and forgot the part of it still living. And when she came in here and told you she was in trouble, asked for your help, I bet the first thing that crossed your mind was to wonder what the ladies in the Flower and Garden Club would say, or if it meant you'd have to stay away from Amy Lauder's weddin. Hurt's a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don't change facts. You have been selfish."
He reached down and helped her up. She came to her feet like a sleepwalker. Her expression didn't change; her eyes were still wide and unbelieving. Relentlessness hadn't yet come back into them, but Frannie dully thought that in time it would.
It would.
"It's my fault for letting you go on. For not wanting any unpleasantness. For not wanting to rock the boat. I was selfish, too, you see. And when Fran went off to school I thought, Well, now Carla can have what she wants and it won't hurt nobody but herself, and if a person doesn't know they're hurting, why, maybe they're not. I was wrong. I've been wrong before, but never as bad as this." Gently, but with great force, he reached out and grasped Carla's shoulders. "Now: I am telling you this as your husband. If Frannie needs a place to stay, this can be the place - same as it always was. If she needs money, she can have it from my purse - same as she always could. And if she decides to keep her baby, you will see that she has a proper baby shower, and you may think no one will come, but she has friends, good ones, and they will. I'll tell you one more thing, too. If she wants it christened, it will be done right here. Right here in this goddamned parlor."
Carla's mouth had dropped open, and now a sound began to come from it. At first it sounded uncannily like the whistle of a teakettle on a hot burner. Then it became a keening wail.
"Peter, your own son lay in his coffin in this room! "
"Yes. And that's why I can't think of a better place to christen a new life," he said. "Fred's blood. Live blood. Fred himself, he's been dead a lot of years, Carla. He was worm-food long since."