The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie Read Free Book Online Page A

tuneless way. He would gun the engine and stutter through yellow lights, as if he couldn’t wait to get there and be rid of Polly. When he stopped the car at the house he sometimes wouldn’t even go around to open the door for her — he would just reach across and yank on the pitted chrome handle. “So long, Polly-O, see you next week, same time,” he would say, but often that was a lie.
    Once she had had some therapy, of course, Polly realized that she had still been in love with her father all those years, and furious at him for abandoning her, for forcing her to grow up in a family she didn’t belong in. She told herself that it was the chase, the effort of wooing, perhaps even the novelty of being refused, that had engaged Carl Alter’s attention. When he knew himself secure in his daughter’s love he became restive, in fact bored with her. Because that was how men were. They’d do anything to persuade you into caring for them, trusting them, giving up your independence, taking on what they used to call — not that most of them would dare use the phrase nowadays — “the feminine role.” And then once you were really caught, once you’d cut your options and were helpless and dependent, economically or emotionally or both, they disengaged as fast as they could.
    With Elsa’s help Polly had slowly moved toward forgiving her father, at least intellectually, for the way he had behaved when she was a child. She had taught herself to remember that he wasn’t much more than a child himself — only twenty-two when she was born, an embarrassing six months after the hurried shotgun wedding of two college students who hardly knew each other. Polly was barely a year old when Carl Alter was drafted into the army, and it was two years after that before he came home to stay. Many young guys in his position, she had to admit, would have decided to forget that they had ever had a daughter.
    But Polly still couldn’t forgive her father for the way he had behaved later on, after her mother married Bob Milner and they moved to Rochester. She couldn’t forgive him for not writing more often, or for coming to see her only twice a year, and sometimes not even that. Carl Alter was living in Boston then, but it wasn’t that far, she used to think, opening the atlas and running her finger across green Massachusetts and pink New York State. It wasn’t as if she were in Texas, or Alaska.
    After a while Polly had decided she didn’t care whether her father came to Rochester or not. He was an embarrassment, anyhow, with his broken promises, his unsteady jobs, his unpressed clothes and his battered old cars (The Yellow Peril had died, but it was succeeded by vehicles of the same genus, The Black Death and The White Whale). She decided she was really glad when he went to work on a small-town newspaper in California, across a whole checkerboard of colored states, because she wouldn’t have to bother with him at all anymore.
    By the time she reached high school Polly had realized that Carl Alter not only seldom came to see her, he never sent any money for her support. It used to make her furious that her mother wasn’t angry about this.
    “I don’t see why you want me to write to him,” she had complained once. “I don’t see why you can even stand him, after the way he’s treated us.”
    “Oh, well,” Bea Milner said, with her characteristic smiling sigh. “It’s not his fault, you know. Carl never had any money; probably never will.”
    “It’s his fault that he married you and then deserted you,” Polly insisted.
    “Oh no, darling. You mustn’t think that way. It was nobody’s fault. We were both so young, and we didn’t think about the future. Things happen, that’s all.”
    Which was typical of how her mother’s mind worked, Polly thought as the bus ground its way through Columbus Circle. Bea Milner was a classic example of the unliberated woman. Men, and what men wanted, always had priority with her. When