She had opened the restaurant as so many persons opened Bucks County establishments, hoping to enjoy themselves without too great an operating loss. At the end of the first year she was astonished when her accountant reported a net loss of less than two thousand dollars. That first year was the only time Tannhauser’s was ever in the red, and each year her net profit increased.
On weekends a pianist played old standards in the cocktail lounge from ten until one. Sometimes late at night she could be talked into a song. Something of Weill’s perhaps, or an Edith Piaf song. Never anything operatic.
Many patrons, including some who came back often, called her Frau Tannhauser. She answered to that name as well as to any other.
On the first Saturday night in June, Hugh handed his car keys to the parking-lot attendant and led Linda Robshaw up flagstone steps and into Tannhauser’s. It had rained off and on through the day, but by late afternoon the skies had cleared and now the night air was cool and refreshing. Hugh himself felt cool and refreshed. His beard was properly trimmed, its few gray hairs vainly plucked out. His cheeks and neck were clean-shaven and freshly anointed with Russian Leather.
His suit was a dove gray double: knit he had bought impulsively the previous October in New York and had never worn since he tried it on. He’d been back to work when Wallaeh’s delivered it, hitting his stride in the last stretch of his first draft, and he took it from its box and hung it in his closet without noticing what it was. If they had shipped him an evening gown by mistake he would have put it on a hanger and put it away without complaint.
Tonight he came across it in the closet, tried it on, and found it flattered him. The cut was younger and more fashionable than his usual style. On his way out the door Karen made a great show of approval. “You look fantastic,” she told him. “If Linda Robshaw isn’t here for breakfast tomorrow morning, then there’s something wrong with her. You really look great.”
He looked great and felt great. He had planned to take a week or ten days away from the book, and it had been three and a half weeks since he covered his typewriter and he had not yet uncovered it, nor did he intend to for another five days or so. He was not working and it did not bother him in the least. He looked great and felt great and he was taking a bright and charming and damned attractive young woman to dinner, and he was happier than he had been in months.
“Hugh, Hugh Markarian!” Trude boomed his name, then followed her voice across the room with arms outstretched. She hugged him furiously. “I saw your name on the reservation list and was so pleased. And you look so good! And is this Karen? Liebchen, I have not seen you—”
“This is Miss Robshaw,” he said. “Linda, this is our hostess, Trude Hofmeister.”
“Miss Robshaw,” Trude said. “But it is so difficult to distinguish between beautiful young women. Hugh, I have a table for you by the window. It is a such a beautiful night for the view.”
They went to their table and ordered drinks. Linda said, “When she drops a brick she certainly picks it back up in a hurry. Her face didn’t show a thing.”
“She’s pretty good. I doubt that she’d recognize Karen if she stepped on her, but she must have heard she was in town and came to the obvious conclusion.”
“Do Karen and I look alike?”
“Only insofar as it is zo difficult to distingvish betveen beautiful young vimmen,” he said, his accent a good imitation of Trude’s. “Does it bother you being taken gar my daughter?”
“No. Should it? It’s slightly flattering, but I own a mirror and I know I don’t look — how old is Karen? Eighteen?”
He nodded. “I’m still old enough to be your father.”
“Well, you’re not my father, and he’s almost old enough to be your father, as far as that goes. Are you feeling very conscious of your age or is it that you’re getting a kick out of my youth?”
“Well, it can’t be the first, because I haven’t felt this good in I don’t know how long. I should have gone back to work on the book a week ago and I haven’t even set foot in that room. Excuse me, I went in there the night before last to look something up in the dictionary. And walked on out without even glancing at my desk.”
“And it evidently doesn’t bother you.”
“I couldn’t care less. It’s not as if I were stalled on the book, trying to get back to it and unable to get anywhere. But it’s fine, it’s coming fine and sometime next week I’ll start working again. Meanwhile I’m getting to know my daughter. It’s an exhilarating experience, getting to know an eighteen-year-old girl who happens to be your daughter. Girl. I was going to say eighteen-year-old woman: Neither word is right. An eighteen-year-old female?”
“That sounds like something in a statistical abstract. The percentage of eighteen-year-old female dope peddlers in Elyria, Ohio.”
“Girl-woman would be the word if it wasn’t so precious. What were you like when you were eighteen?”
She thought for a moment. “Not a girl-woman, certainly. Just a girl, I’m afraid. What’s Karen like?”
“You’ll have to meet her sometime, and then I can ask you the same question. I’ve been spending my time trying to learn the answer myself. It’s — what did I call it before? An exhilarating experience. Very enjoyable, but also something of a challenge in a way. Oh, here’s Robert. I almost didn’t recognize you with that mustache, Robert.”
“I’m not sure if I’ll keep it or not, sir.”
“Well, you want to give it a chance before you decide. Did you want to order, Linda?”
“Yes, I’m starved.”
It was an exhilarating experience, getting to know an eighteen-year-old girl-woman who happened to be your daughter. It was exhilarating and it was a challenge. You could not pretend that she was not your daughter because there were ghosts in every room that held the two of you. You had seen her in the nurse’s arms before they had a chance to clean her up, still filthy with the detritus of the delivery, and that ghost was present along with the ghosts of all the other vivid moments of the twelve years she had lived under your roof.
Of course she had shocked him. A dropout in her first year of college, living with a man, not even a man but several men. She had smoked marijuana; she had probably tried other drugs she had not told him about. She had become pregnant, perhaps without knowing who the father was, and had made the question of paternity academic by obtaining an abortion.
(“One piece of advice,” he told her. “How much or how little you tell your mother is between the two of you, but if you have any sense you won’t tell her about the abortion. She may have left the Church when she was younger than you are now, but parts of her are more Catholic than you may realize.” She said it hadn’t kept her mother from divorcing him. “No, but it once kept her from getting an abortion. No, not you, for God’s sake. No child was ever more desired than you. But she became pregnant when you were ten or eleven, and the turn our marriage had taken, a new baby was the worst possible idea. She had a miscarriage and did everything but light candles in gratitude, but that was already after she had ruled out getting an abortion. So don’t say anything to her, will you?” She said, “Oh, hell, she still thinks I’m a virgin.”)
She had shocked him with the first revelations and she shocked him intermittently thereafter, not with new facts but as he increasingly discovered her as a person. It was not that she was a shocking person. Had she been the daughter of a friend he would have found wholly admirable the very aspects that kept disconcerting him now.