Forbidden Sister (2 page)

“
Mon dieu, mon dieu!
It broke my heart to hear all of that, but I didn’t cry in front of him.”

Even now, talking about it brought tears to her eyes, however.

My mother told me more about Roxy after my father had passed away. I was devastated by my father’s death, but now that he was no longer there to stop it, I wanted to hear as much as I could about my forbidden sister, the sister whose existence I could never acknowledge.

I had no trouble pretending I was an only child. Since the day Roxy had left, I was living that way anyway. My father had taken all of her pictures off the walls and shelves and dressers. He had burned most of them. Mama was able to hide a few, but anything else Roxy had left behind was dumped down the garbage
chute. It was truly as if he thought he could erase all traces of her existence. He never even acknowledged her birthday. Looking at the calendar, he would do little more than blink.

He didn’t know it, but I still had a charm bracelet Roxy had given me. It had a wonderful variety of charms that included the Eiffel Tower, a fan, a pair of dancing shoes, and a dream catcher. My mother’s brother had given it to her when my parents and she were in France visiting, and she gave it to me. I never wore it in front of my father for fear that he would seize it and throw it away, too.

Of course, I could never mention her name in front of my father when he was alive, and I didn’t dare ask him any questions about her. My mother was the one who told me almost all I knew about Roxy after she had left. She said that once my father had seen Roxy in the limousine, he had tried to learn more about her, despite himself. He found out that she lived in a fancy hotel on the East Side, the Hotel Beaux-Arts. I had overheard them talking about it. The Beaux-Arts was small but very expensive. Most of the rooms were suites and some were full apartments. My mother said that my father was impressed with how expensive it was.

“The way he spoke about her back then made me think that he was impressed with how much money she was making. Before I could even think he had softened his attitude about her, he added that she was nothing more than a high-priced prostitute,” she said.

She didn’t want to tell me all of this, but it was as if it had all been boiling inside her and she finally had the
chance to get it out. I knew that she went off afterward to cry in private. I was conflicted about asking her questions because I saw how painful it was for her to tell these things to me. I rarely heard my parents speak about Roxy, and I knew I couldn’t ask my mother any questions about her in front of Papa. If I did ask when he wasn’t home, my mother would avoid answering or answer quickly, as if she expected the very walls would betray her and whisper to my father.

However, the questions were there like weeds, undaunted, invulnerable, and as defiant as Roxy.

What did she look like now?

What was her life really like?

Was she happy? Did she have everything she wanted?

Was she sad about losing her family?

Mostly, I wanted to know if she ever thought about me. It suddenly occurred to me one day that Roxy might have believed that my father risked my mother’s life to have me just so he could ignore her. He was that disgusted with her. Surely, if Roxy thought that, she could have come to hate me.

Did she still hate me?

The answers were out there, just waiting for me. They taunted me and haunted me.

I had no doubt, however, that I would eventually get to know them.

What I wondered was, would I be sorry when I did get to know them?

Would they change my life?

And maybe most important of all, would I hate my sister as much as my father had?

My father was always the first to rise in the morning, even on weekends. He was never quiet about it, either. All three bedrooms in our town house just off Madison Avenue on East 81st Street in New York were upstairs. It was a relatively new building in the neighborhood, and Papa often complained about the workmanship and how the builders had cut corners to make more money. He said the older structures on the street were far more solid, even though ours cost more. Our walls were thinner, as were the framing and the floors.

Consequently, I could hear him close drawers, start his shower, close cabinets, and even talk to Mama, especially if their bedroom door was open. The cacophony of sounds he made was his rendition of Army reveille. Of course, being the son of an Army general, he actually had heard it most of his young life. His family had often lived that close to the barracks, depending on where his father had been stationed, especially when they were overseas. When I commented about it once, Mama said the volume of the noise he made after he got up in the morning was a holdover from the days when Roxy lived with us. Her
bedroom was on the other side of theirs. She would never wake up for school on her own, so Papa would be sure to make all this noise to get her up much earlier than was necessary. No matter what Mama said, he was stubborn about it. Maybe Roxy had inherited that obstinacy from him. Who could be more inflexible when he had made up his mind than my father?

Even though he basically had defied his own father’s wishes and chosen a business career rather than a military one as his older brother, Orman, had, Papa still believed in military discipline. Disobeying an order in our house could lead to the equivalent of being court-martialed. At least, that was how it felt to me, and I’m sure it had felt that way to Roxy, especially when he told her to leave the house. To her it must have been like a dishonorable discharge. Perhaps, despite what Papa said, she had felt some shame. I imagined she would have, even though I couldn’t remember her that well anymore. After all, it was now a little more than nine years since I had last seen her or heard her voice.

I often wondered if she had seen me and secretly watched me growing up. During these years, did she hide somewhere nearby and wait for a glimpse of either my mother or me? One of the first things I used to do when I stepped out, and often still do, was to look across the street, searching for someone Roxy’s age standing behind a car or off to the side of a building, watching for any sight of us. Even if I didn’t see her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she followed me to school.

Sometimes I would pretend she was, and I would stop suddenly and turn to catch her. People behind me would look annoyed or frightened. Whenever I walked in the city, whether to school or to the store or just to meet friends, I would scan the faces of any young woman who would be about Roxy’s age. I often studied some young woman’s face so hard she flashed anger back at me, and I quickly looked away and sped up.

One of the first things my parents had taught me about walking the streets of New York was never to make too much eye contact with strangers. I supposed Roxy would be like a complete stranger to me now. I even had trouble recalling the sound of her voice, but I did sneak looks at the pictures of her that Mama had hidden every chance I had.

I believed that Roxy would be as curious about me as I was about her. Why shouldn’t she be? Although I feared it, it was hard for me to accept that she hated Mama and me because of what Papa had done to her. Despite his stern ways, it was also hard for me to believe she hated him. Maybe it was difficult only because I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t even want to think that someone with whom I shared so much DNA could be that bad, that immoral. Or did it mean that somewhere deep inside me there was a strain of evil that would someday rise to the surface, too? How would it show itself? What emotions, lusts, and desires did we share?

Having an older sister who had become so infamous to my parents naturally made me worry about
myself. When I suggested such a thing to Mama once, she looked at me with pain in her eyes. I know the pain was there, because, like me, she didn’t want to believe Roxy was so wicked and sinful or as evil as Papa made her out to be. Then she softened her look and told me to think of Cain and Abel in the Bible. Abel wasn’t evil because Cain was. Abel was good.

“Besides, we must not believe that evil is stronger than good, Emmie. You’re my perfect daughter, my
fille parfaite, n’est-ce pas?
”

“
Oui,
Mama,” I would say whenever she asked me that, but I didn’t believe I was as perfect as Mama or Papa thought I was. Who could be?

Yes, I kept my room neat, made my bed, helped Mama with house chores, shopped for her, came home when my parents told me I must, never smoked or drank alcohol with my classmates, not even a beer, and refused to try any drugs or pot any classmate offered. Mama believed in letting me drink wine at dinner, even when I was barely ten, and I drank some vodka to celebrate things occasionally, but that was the way she had been brought up in France, and Papa thought it was just fine.

“The best training ground for most things is your home,” he would tell me. My friends at school, especially the ones who knew how strict my father could be, didn’t know what to make of that. He sounded so lenient, but I knew that his leniency didn’t go any farther than our front door. Sometimes, especially when I left our house, I felt as if I were walking around with an invisible leash and collar around my neck.

Rules rained down around me everywhere I looked, not just in my home. Our school, which was a private school, didn’t tolerate sexy clothing or any body piercing, not that I wanted to do that. Our teachers even criticized some girls for wearing too much makeup. It was far more serious for my classmates to violate rules than it was for students in a public school, because, unlike in a public school, they wouldn’t simply be suspended. They’d be thrown out, and all of their tuition money would be forfeited. What they did after school the moment they left the property was another thing, however. Buttons were undone, rings were put in noses, and cigarettes came out of hidden places. Students puffed defiantly. Suddenly, their mouths were full of profanity, words they would be afraid even to whisper in the school’s hallways. It was as if all of the pent-up nasty behavior was bursting at the seams. They were far from goody-goodies, so why shouldn’t I wonder if I was, too?

I probably wouldn’t be attending a strict private school if it weren’t for Roxy. She had been going to a public school, had been suspended for smoking and for cheating on a test, and, worst of all, was nearly arrested and expelled for smoking a joint in the girls’ room. It was one of the better public schools in New York, too, but according to what I gleaned from Mama, Roxy never had better than barely passing grades.

The only thing she excelled at was speaking French, thanks to Mama. But even with that skill, she got in trouble. She would say nasty things in French to her teachers under her breath or even aloud, and when
some of them went to the language teacher for translations, Roxy ended up in the principal’s office, and Mama would have to come to school. She tried to keep as much of it as she could hidden from Papa, but often there was just too much to hide, and whatever he did learn was way more than enough to rile him and send him into a rage.

Mama could get away with hiding much of it, because Papa was dedicated to his work at the investment firm. He was up early to deal with the stock market and then always working late into the afternoon with financial planning and other meetings. Mama said that her having to call him at work because of something Roxy had done was like the president having to use the famous red phone or something. I had no doubt that Mama trembled whenever she had to tell him about something very bad Roxy had done in school. She said he was so furious that he could barely speak whenever he had to leave work to attend a meeting because of something she had done.

“It got so that your sister wouldn’t even pretend to feel remorseful about something she had done. She would just look at him with that silent defiance, just as she would when he would rattle the whole house to get her out of bed in the morning.”

Even though Papa got up earlier than I would have to on weekday mornings, I was used to rising and having breakfast with him and Mama. She was always up to make his breakfast. I would spend the extra morning time studying for a test or reading. Whenever I did anything that was the opposite of what Roxy would
have done, such as be at breakfast with him, I could see the satisfaction in Papa’s face. I used to think, and still do, that he was letting out an anxious breath, always half expecting that I would somehow turn out to be like Roxy. No matter how well I did in school, how polite I was to his and Mama’s friends, or how much I helped Mama, he couldn’t help fearing that I would wake up one day and be like my sister.

It was as if he had two different kinds of daughters. One was Dr. Jekyll, and the other was Miss Hyde, only he wasn’t sure if Miss Hyde would also emerge in me.

“So what’s on for today?” Papa asked. It was the same question he asked me every day at breakfast.

Anyone who thought that he asked it out of habit would be wrong, however. He really wanted to know what I had to do and, especially, what I wanted to do. My route to and from school was to follow Madison Avenue north for five blocks and then turn west for another block. I could do it blindfolded by now. If I had any plans to diverge from the route, especially during nice weather like what we were having this particular fall, and go somewhere after school, I would have to tell him. He even wanted to know when I would take my lunch and eat it with some friends in Central Park. The school let us do that. Even many of our teachers did it, but doing something spontaneously was very difficult.