A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (27 page)

“I swore I’d never kill anyone ever again. I think the only way I could ever kill someone was if a person tried to hurt you kids or your mother.” He said this in a neutral tone, his green eyes glaring with intent, which made his words even more emphatic. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he would do just that. “And that’s about the only reason I’d kill anyone anymore…” His voice trailed off.

My brother had an aversion to displays of emotion. He turned pale and lowered his eyes whenever a person shouted or cried or pleaded. The only times I ever saw him show emotion were when we watched slapstick comedies, Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy. He’d sit wide-eyed and licking his lips in front of the television, bracing himself for the next gut-wrenching laugh. He’d turn red as a beet and laugh so hard, kicking up his feet, that he’d fall backwards out of his chair. Watching him was more amusing than watching the movies, which I found idiotic, and I made certain to tell him so at every opportunity. “I can’t
believe
you like those idiots!” I’d hiss, and he’d gaze at me with the droopy-eyed look of a dog who knows he’s done something wrong and has now to endure the punishment to be once again left alone. Oh, how I had hated that look.

Our first month in kindergarten at the École de Lorraine did not go well for Billy. My parents had asked me to “look out for him,” but I was embarrassed by him. From the very first day, our teacher singled him out to ridicule, to use as the brunt of all her jokes.

Our teacher was never able to break him, and came to hate that doggish look of his even more than I did. One day he scribbled all over his notebooks: big, dark knots of color from corner to corner. The teacher grabbed him by the ear, dragged him to the outer hallway, and shoved him into the hanging coats. She slammed the door on him and turned toward us, wiping her hands as though to say it was a job well done.

The scene caused in me the most agonizingly ambivalent feelings. I hated the woman, wanted to attack her, bite her legs, cry out, “It’s not fair!” But I also felt so safe and invisible in my neutrality that I loved her for not despising
me.
I never said a word.

From that day on, Billy spent a good deal of time out in the hall with his face in the coats.

After about a month, my mother took me aside one afternoon and asked me apprehensively, “So, how’s Billy doing in school?”

“I don’t know,” I responded, shrugging. “Mademoiselle Fournier always puts him in the
vestiaire
.”

“
Vestiaire
? What the hell is that?” Her dark-blue eyes went round and the corners of her mouth began to twitch.

“The coat closet, you know.”

“Whatever for?” my mother cried out.

“She doesn’t like him more than she doesn’t like anybody else.”

I followed my mother down to Billy’s room. He was hunched over his new Civil War fort and hand-painted Confederate and Union lead soldiers that our dad had ordered all the way from FAO Schwarz in New York City. Our father held a special admiration for Robert E. Lee and his troops (although he was quick to point out that he was on the side of the Union) and had apparently passed these feelings on to Billy. My brother had lined up all the blue soldiers on one side of the fort, and the grays on the other, and seemed to be having trouble deciding who would have the fort for today’s battle.

“Billy, why didn’t you tell me that Mademoiselle Fournier puts you in the
vestiaire
?”

“I don’t know,” my brother said, looking at his soldiers. No matter how much our mom cajoled, he wouldn’t say another word.

The next afternoon she came to fetch us at school. We were in the courtyard, standing in line on the dusty gravel, waiting with the rest of our class for our mothers and nannies. We were surprised to see our mother because Candida usually came to get us.

She marched up to Mademoiselle Fournier, who was of indeterminate age and had dark hair like steel wool, and said in her almost incomprehensible French, “So, Madam, why is my son always in the
vestiaire
?”

“Pardon?”
said Mademoiselle Fournier with a contemptuous expression.

“Oh, come on, you understand me perfectly well,” said our mom. “Channe, translate for me, will you?”

“
Ma mère voudrait savoir
,” I said, looking up at Mademoiselle, “
pourquoi mon frère est toujours dans le vestiaire
.”

Mademoiselle turned to our mother with a haughty air and said, “Well, today it was because he threw sand in a boy’s eyes.”

“Sand?” asked my mother. “Sand? What do you mean?”

“Oui, du sable, parfaitement!”
She pointed toward the gravelly, sandy ground of the courtyard. Our mom bent over and picked up a handful of dirt in her gloved fist and threw it into Mademoiselle’s face.

“Well, here’s some sand for you, you
bitch!”
she shouted in English. All the mothers and children turned toward us. Mademoiselle cried out and brought her hands to her eyes. Our mom grabbed us by the wrists and dragged us, running as fast as she could, through the large double doors of the school’s main entrance.

The next day we were registered at the École Internationale Bilingue.

An amazing trait of my brother’s was that, although I was unwilling to stick up for him in difficult situations, he showed an almost fanatical loyalty to me.

In the fall of our seventh year, a boy at Bilingue named Didier yanked my gray pleated uniform skirt up to my chest during recreation, while several other boys stood around and jeered.

God knows, I was such a flirt I probably deserved it. Didier was one of the boys I couldn’t stay away from. I was infatuated with boys who had an unruly look to them, and Didier was the unruliest of the lot. No matter how often a teacher told him to tuck his shirt in, his shirttails hung out of his shorts in back. He always had a new bruise or cut, one gray sock invariably had lost its elastic and sagged in folds around his ankle, and his shock of brown hair stood out at all angles from his head. The day before, I had allowed him to kiss me behind a stone statue, and today he had yanked up my skirt. What injustice!

My brother approached me with a certain amount of discomfort as I sat off to the side, crying and humiliated, on a stone park bench. We were in the same grade but a different class, and shared the same recreation spot—it was a long, pebbled alley lined with trees in the Champs de Mars Park below the Eiffel Tower. Stuttering, I reported what had happened while he frowned over me.

“Which one?” he asked, looking toward the group of boys in the distance. They had resumed their game and were running around in wild circles, laughing, having already thoroughly forgotten the incident.

I pointed out Didier, who was almost a head taller than the others. He was big for a French boy.

My brother gazed at the pack for a long moment, thinking. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to go say a thing to him.”

Billy sighed, shoved his hands into the front pockets of his shorts, and set off toward the pack. Seriously worried, I followed a few steps behind. It was clear Billy had made up his mind and trying to talk him out of it wasn’t going to do any good.

He walked right into the middle of the pack and tapped Didier on the shoulder. It was reassuring that they were approximately the same size. Billy said,
“Je m’appelle Billy Willis et tu viens d’attaquer ma soeur”—
My name is Billy Willis and you just attacked my sister.

Didier spun around, the game stopped, and silence fell around them. I kept a few feet behind Billy.

“If you say you’re sorry I won’t have to knock you down,” Billy went on in the calmest of tones.

“Why should I?” said Didier, throwing him a suspicious glare and looking around for support. None of the other boys seemed to want to get involved (they were not as big as Didier or Billy), and to my profound relief they took a collective step backward.

“I’m going to count to three,” Billy said. Didier put his hands on his hips and tapped his foot impatiently.

“Un, deux, trois,
” Billy said. Then he pulled some kind of judo maneuver which involved kicking Didier’s feet out from under him, and Didier fell to the ground.

“Sorry,” Billy said, offering his hand to help Didier to his feet. Didier ignored him.

“It’s just that I can’t allow anyone to attack my sister.”

Didier wiped the dirt off the back of his shorts.

“We’re going to drop this for now,” he said, and turned away. Under the circumstances, it probably seemed the reasonable thing to do.

“How did you learn to do that?” I mumbled as my brother and I walked off.

Blushing, he explained that there was a judo class on TV at eight a.m. on Saturdays. “I didn’t really want to do that. He seemed like an all right boy.”

“Whose side’re you on anyway?” I said, punching him lightly in the arm.

That was one of the problems between us: It was not that he adored me so much that he was convinced I could do no wrong—it was the principle of the thing. I had been terrorizing him for three years now, with the help of Candida, who smacked him hard on the side of the head whenever a fight erupted between us.

Our father had forbidden him to hit me, and Billy never did, although he’d figured out numerous ways to wrestle me and pin me down without hurting me. His face bore the scars from my bites and scratches. I wasn’t allowed to scratch or bite him either, of course, but that didn’t stop me.

Sometimes, if he was angry enough, he would pin me down, sit on my face, and fart. Sometimes I managed to bite his behind, but usually he was too quick. This drove me to madness.

If we were caught by our mother, red-handed in the middle of a fight, she automatically took his side, compensating, I gather, for Candida’s bias toward me. Our mother was generally correct in her assumption, but the times that I was innocent and he was guilty yet I was punished are the ones I remember. I was convinced she loved him better, and hated myself for not being able to get her to love me more.

If our mother ever asked him what was that new scratch on his face, he’d respond that he’d been playing with one of the Siamese cats. His unwillingness to report me must have come from his year in the children’s home, where it probably was the little ones against the big ones, and no one with dignity tattled.

It hurt my feelings nevertheless that he felt he
had
to defend my honor simply because I was his sister, not because he adored me. But I admired him just the same.

That spring when we were seven, the school gave our grade some form of French aptitude test and found that Billy could neither read nor write. Madame Beauvier, the
directrice
, called our father at home and he flew over to the school in a rage. I was in a class upstairs and we could hear his shouting echoing through the halls.

“What kind of school are you that you let a kid go three whole years before you realize he can’t read?! AND TAKE THAT SANCTIMONIOUS LOOK OFF YOUR FACE, IT MAKES ME WANT TO CHUCK YOU RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW!”

In the back of the car that afternoon, regaling in the fact that there was yet another thing I was better at than Billy, I asked him deliciously if it was true that he couldn’t read or write.