Our Father (11 page)

What happened? She only got sick last spring. Maybe she was sick before that, couldn’t attend to things. Because everything has gone to pieces, all the gardens are a wreck, He still had the groundsmen working, how come? As if when she stopped overseeing things, they fell apart. As if she was the soul of a house she could never own. All His money and power couldn’t keep things together.

Maybe it takes love to keep things together.

Hah! Where do you find that?

Where could Momma find it, twenty-six years old, her own mother dead, alone alone alone in the world, friendless world for her. Getting this job a fluke for her.

She never tired of talking about the man in a uniform who came for her in a limousine! Her shabby coat, belongings in shopping bags. Servant shortage or she never would have got such a job. The driver told her to sit in the back and she held on to the handgrip in terror, sure someone would come and rip her out of this car in which she did not belong. They drove to this town, all white the trees iced the snow still over the fields not like Boston where it had turned to stained slush. And the houses so big, so many trees, she hadn’t imagined houses like this, farmhouses were sometimes big but not like these houses.

And then her first sight of the house! And then inside! All those rooms, all that furniture, so grand, so elegant, so rich. She even had her own room up on the third floor, closed now, a whole floor of servants’ bedrooms, little cells with one shared bath. Thing is, it was better than what she was used to. She was working in a palace. Housemaid to an Anglo god. Must have terrified her: what did she know about polishing silver and crystal? Treating antique walnut and rosewood? She tiptoed around the rooms terrified of breaking scratching soiling something. He had a full staff then, she could already speak English, she listened, watched the cook. Each thing she learned made her proud of herself: mastering skills, acquiring knowledge. Well she had hadn’t she: how to clean crystal chandeliers, get stains out of Persian carpets. How many people know such things? She learned so well that when He reduced the staff He promoted her to housekeeper and cook. On call twenty-four hours a day six days a week, two hundred dollars a month plus room and board. Almost never anyone here anymore except Him for a few weeks in the summer. All the wives dead or gone, the children elsewhere. Only the July Fourth party. Maybe He was fucking her from the beginning, why He kept her on, promoted her.

I was born in April 1959. AprilMarchFebruaryJanuaryDecemberNovemberOctoberSeptemberAugust yes, August 1958, in the summer when he was here alone, that’s when. Maybe started earlier. She came in the snow, after Christmas JanuaryFebruary probably, 1956. I know how it was, had to be. Some night, late, He in bed, calls her on the intercom, Noradia bring me a brandy, she young and smooth and simple climbs the stairs approaches nervously carrying blown glass on a silver tray, come here, sit down. Do you like me? Oh,
sí señor
. Fervently. Loved a disgusting old man, over fifty already, wrinkled skin white as a dead fish, head half bald, that hawk nose. All he had was money. Power. Is that what you loved him for Momma? Because he was the
señor
? Droit du seigneur. The women of your family had to know all about that. Still, how could you stand those hands on your smooth golden body?

Fury gushed around her heart and Ronnie rose and paced but it was a joke pacing in that room, three steps one way, three back. She fell into the chair again, put her head in her hands.

I hate you Momma, she whispered weeping, I hate, hate, hate you!

5

S
UNDAY IT RAINED OFF
and on all afternoon, the sky a thick gray gruel. The sisters could not settle. Elizabeth plonked herself in Father’s study to examine his papers and put what she had in some coherent arrangement, but kept waking startled from minddrift, finding herself leaning back in his high-backed desk chair facing the window and the bleak chilly November day. Her eyes seemed to burn all the time, and she had put on eyeglasses instead of her contact lenses. But the bone-framed glasses annoyed her too and she regularly removed and wiped them clean, rubbing the sides of her nose and the spot they touched behind her ears. Occasionally, laying the glasses on the desk, she would get up and wander into the kitchen for some coffee, or to the toilet to wash her face, or to the sitting room where Mary was reading, some stupid romance probably. Mary always wrapped her books in tooled leather covers. Pretentious way to conceal her trash. Unspeaking, Elizabeth would stand by the front windows and look out at the rain.

Then she’d return and begin to search the room, already searched thoroughly several times. The need to find the will was sharp in her chest like the stays in those corselets worn in the fifties. … Mary would remember, what were they called, merry widows? So thin we were, but we encased ourselves in those iron maidens, and sometimes the stays broke through the fabric. Metal or bone, they poked at, dug into the skin, they hurt. Happened to me once at a tea dance with some Princeton boys. By the time I got back to my room, the skin over my ribs was cut and bloody under my breasts, my ostensible breasts, as Mary called them. She was five years younger but twice my size, there at least. So proud of that. Funny. So much feeling about the size of breasts. Never understood. Still, I was trying in those days to be a girl, to be like other girls. Deep red lipstick, pale eyebrows, high heels.

She always said I was jealous of her looks but I never tried to compete with her, knew I couldn’t. Didn’t even want to. It wasn’t looks I wanted. …

She slammed a file drawer in exasperation. Why am I doing this! I have searched this room five times over! Why am I so intent on finding the will? She flopped in the desk chair and her head fell onto the desk. Oh, god because I want it, I want to be his heir, I want to see the words typed on the paper, I want to hear my name read out: “and to my daughter Elizabeth … my dear daughter Elizabeth” … I could even accept “my dear daughters Elizabeth and Mary” …

I need to hear it.

But I don’t need the money. In itself.

Knock it off, Upton, you’d love to have millions.

What would I do with them?

Feel rich. Buy a country house. Buy a Porsche like Clare’s. You loved driving that car.

But you’re dreaming of money like winning a lottery. You don’t need it.

I need it I need it.

Don’t tell me you believe in symbols: Money equals love. If he loves us, he will leave us his estate? My father’s house. My father’s estate.

What I really want is to see my name listed as executor, as he would have named a son.

She raised her head. Oh, god, what if he didn’t! She bit her lower lip, eyes alarmed, upper body stiff and erect. It would be unbearable if he had not entrusted
her
—an assistant secretary of the treasury—with that job, if he had consigned her along with his other daughters to the keeping of some man. Unbearable.

Mary had had Browning build a fire in the sitting room. It was a large room for one person to sit in, large even for four or five, but it was more comfortable than the stiff formal drawing room and had a wider fireplace. She nestled in a big armchair wearing a soft sweatsuit, a cashmere confection. As she read, she sipped herbal tea, which the housekeeper replenished every hour. But she kept drifting off and would come to staring at the fire remembering her mother sitting in this chair in a white dress, laughing, holding out a pale graceful delicate arm encircled with diamonds, reaching for the cocktail glass the butler handed her. A party it must have been, me carried down for a good-night kiss.

She glanced down at her own pale delicate wrist lying across the book and started, shuddered in horror to see tiny brown hairs rising out of her arm. “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)” Ugh! Disgusting.

She rose, stretched, walked through the front hall, peered into the empty dining room, walked down the hall past the billiards room and into Father’s study. She studied the books on the shelves, ignoring Elizabeth at the desk.

“Not much there you’d be interested in,” Elizabeth said nastily.

“No,” Mary murmured absently.

“Mostly history and politics. Law. Not many novels and
no romances
,” Elizabeth goaded her.

“Yes,” Mary said, drifting out.

Alex found lots of old rain gear in the mudroom behind the kitchen. She took a raincoat and hat and short dirty boots that fit her and went for a walk. She walked for hours, welcoming the cool rain on her face, her mind drifting murkily, all paths leading into an opacity heavier and less penetrable than the weather. Twice as she walked, her entire body jerked the way it might jerk in a bad dream—a sudden, electric, terrifying spasm. It seemed to pierce her entire body. Then it would pass. Am I going crazy? Pushing the thought away, she kept walking.

Ronnie hooked up her computer, transferred her research data from floppy disks to the hard, and made up a schedule. Then she collapsed on the bed, lay there spread-eagled, staring at the ceiling. It was cracked and discolored, probably hadn’t been repainted since she first entered that room as an infant, a few months old. Noradia had told her the room’s history once when she was around fourteen after she railed against Stephen. Momma explained that Stephen had had the huge old kitchens renovated and subdivided after Ronnie was born, so Noradia and her baby could have rooms on the first floor. Momma’s face shone as she told Ronnie of His kindness, His pity for her at having to climb all the way to the third floor several times a day. Ronnie shot back that He’d probably done it so she wouldn’t carry a baby with her as she moved around the house working. Noradia sighed, laid her hands gently on Ronnie’s cheeks, looked at her with that sweet face full of sorrow but radiant. Said, “Ronalda, Ronalda, to be happy in life you must love.”

“Love what!” she’d cried, “anything that comes down the pike? Love evil, love the devil, is that what you’re telling me?” She leapt up, crazy with rage, danced around the kitchen with it, jumping up and down: “Love a rapist, a murderer, a massacrer, a marauder, is that what you’re saying?” Frightening her mother, who sat back heavily, pale, staring at her, murmuring “Ronalda, Ronalda” and twisting her fingers.

The next day I shoved some clothes in a backpack and took off, hitchhiked into Boston. She must have been frozen with fear, not knowing where I was, whether I was alive, if I’d been kidnapped or just run off. He summoned the police for her after two days, but it was hopeless, they couldn’t trace me and what the hell, just a wetback kid, His servant’s kid. Different if it had been
His
kid. Almost a year I let her wait here in torment. Poor Momma, how I made her suffer, I wanted her to suffer, I didn’t care.

But you deserved it, Momma. You did.

She leapt up from the bed, wandered to the desk, the closet, the door, wandered out, met Alex coming in from the mudroom with wet hair, eyes glazed, not even a smile, no word. She just passed by.

Restless, each of them except Ronnie, who never changed for dinner, went up early to change her clothes, and simply by chance each meandered down again and peered into the dining room around six. Table not even set yet. Meeting in the hall, they made their way into the sitting room, seeking something, feeling a need for something. The fire was low but still burning.

“Shall we have cocktails before dinner?” Alex asked brightly. The others agreed with varying degrees of sullenness. “I’ll pour them!” she chirped. Elizabeth had a Perrier, Mary a vermouth cassis, Ronnie a cola; Alex had white wine. “Isn’t this nice?” she smiled, snuggling into a big armchair. “It seems so much homier with a fire, doesn’t it?”

No one responded.

Ronnie added some logs to the fire, piling them on their ends as if she were building a tepee.

Mary frowned at this unorthodox method. “Browning takes care of the fire. She doesn’t do it that way.”

“
Mrs.
Browning has enough to do getting dinner,” Ronnie said dismissively. The fire flared brilliantly. She wiped her soiled hands on the sides of her jeans, then perched on the footstool beside the fireplace, watching over it as if it were a baby in a cradle.

“Oh, there’s just nothing homier than a fire!” Alex cried joyously.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes, Mary eyed her.

“It’s true!” she protested, laughing. “Say it isn’t true!”

They smiled. Grudgingly.

Alex leaned back expansively in her chair. “This is such a beautiful house. Has it always been in the Upton family?”

Mary looked at Elizabeth. “You’re the family historian, Lizzie.”

Elizabeth frowned. “No, it came from Margaret Linden, who married Abner Upton in 1868. She was our great-great-grandmother and the only heir to the Linden fortune, one son having died in his youth, the other during the Civil War. Lincoln has an interesting history. One Squaw Sachem sold the six square miles that became Lincoln to English settlers in exchange for some hatchets, hoes, knives, cloth, and clothing. In 1636, Thomas Flint settled Concord farm and Flint’s Pond, which became the town center of Lincoln—which was incorporated separately in 1754. On April 19, 1775, Paul Revere was captured here. It was always a town of mavericks, people who insisted on their own religion, their own ways. It was just a little farm town until the twentieth century, when the railroad was extended, and people began to build summer homes here. It’s still a maverick town, really. The first Linden house burned down; this one dates back to the 1780s, the old part, Father’s study. The house was added to and added to over the years, the last time after Margaret married Abner. And of course it’s been modernized since. Inside.

“The Uptons have lived in Louisburg Square for generations. Worth got that house of course, he was the older brother. Old man Upton didn’t believe in total primogeniture but Worth got the lion’s share—the house on the ocean in Manchester, most of the money. Father got this house and a goodly chunk of stocks. Prudence got mainly jewelry, some of it very valuable. No real estate, but the old man bought her a house in Back Bay when she married Samuel—Grandfather Upton was still alive then. Father was the youngest child. He would probably have inherited more from his mother if he hadn’t scandalized her by marrying a Catholic—my mother—then divorcing her. He’s had to make his own way to some degree. Far more than Worth did.”