“Then it’s a date? Wednesday?”
“You couldn’t just tell your family that you were going to see me, willy-nilly? I mean, granting that I give you permission to see me, which I have not yet done?”
“I could,” Audrey said. “Yes.”
“But you don’t want to?”
“I don’t want to have my allowance stopped, my housekey taken away, my car impounded, my bank account closed, my clothes locked up, and maybe my face slapped, besides. Father’s old-fashioned.”
Jimmie was startled. “He wouldn’t turn you out—just for going around with me?”
“Wouldn’t he?”
“But that’s—why, that’s so damned Victorian!”
“Dad is a Victorian—the worst kind. He is a deacon too. He knows all the definitions of right and wrong—has them down pat, like your father. He’s a sadist besides, because his marriage was always such a nagging bore to him. And he could never figure out how to put a stop to it. Not only that—I refused to marry the man he picked out for me. He won’t say so—and people don’t realize he’s like that—but he believes a daughter is a chattel. My brother ran away long ago. When he was fifteen. We’re one of those families that ‘hasn’t heard since.’ Dad thinks, of course, that Larry’s a gangster by now.
Probably dead. Or in prison. Dad forced an apple-cheeked ass on me—a blond boy from the top drawer of some Chicago bank—and I spit in his eye. He’s got that against me. And he’s got the war and Roosevelt. He has to spoon the foam out of his mouth every morning when he wakes up. He’s nuts. He hasn’t enough employees, and servants, and relatives, for whipping boys. And yet the good people of Muskogewan still go around believing that he is a very solid citizen.”