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Elizabeth had been a beautiful child. Bluemud had always wanted a daughter It had
something to do with the fact that he himself had been very unhappy as a boy. Sexual
matters distressed him deeply during adolescence and he idolized women, placing the on
such pedestals that, if the possessed any beauty at all he had the greatest difficulty in
communicating with them. They often took this for disdain but it was not. He desired them,
wanting to possess them and respect them at the same time. There was no contradiction
in this: a woman had to be attractive, intelligent and free, she had to know her own mind,
have something more about her and finally to be devoted to him. Above all she must not
want to possess him too much. He never really achieved communication with women until
his daughter grew older by which time, of course, he was married. Bluemud's marriage ended with his wife's death in a plane crash. This affected him deeply. He was left with the impression that he had actually been far more devoted to his wife than he really had been. Though there was some degree of choice in it, as with all the marriages of his people, the Bluemud's marriage had been arranged through the Genetics Administration and thus it was through the auspices of a computer that they first met. She had certainly been an attractive woman but, as he soon discovered, she was also impractical, ineffectual and, above all, conventional. Conversely, his behavior and attitudes had been a constant source of embarrassment to her and hers a constant source of irritation to him, especially when he discovered her religious leanings. Thus they were frequently separated and, when together, often not on speaking terms. It was entirely in Bluemud's imagination, for instance, that his late wife had enjoyed his devotion to the celebration of July 4th. In reality she had been constantly terrified that her friends would discover his republican tendencies and that their ostracism from decent society would be the result. When his wife was alive Bluemud treated Elizabeth considerably better than he did after she died. Her mother could not have chosen a worse time to die. Elizabeth was an adolescent then and her personality came as close as it ever would to her mother's. She became a surrogate for her mother though she was not really like her mother at all. What was she like? If you asked him, beautiful. There had been a time when she was an article of faith; when the knowledge that she existed, that she was his child was enough to sustain his existence. He remembered everything about her: changing her diapers, when she walked, when she spoke, what she said to him, when she learned to read - all the things she did at school. Older and more independent she was no longer the rock upon which his life was based but she remained a massive boulder lodged in its shifting and unstable sands. He was proud of her and sorry for her. She had to bear the brunt of his attacks, his scorn and bad temper and still put up with what he was and what he had made her. And she did, because she was his daughter. As for wishing he was a boy, well, he might have said that once in a moment of anger, though he had no memory of such an event, but he would have hated to have had a son. |
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